(MUSIC SEGUE)
[00:00:00] Bob: This week on The Perfect Scam.
[00:00:03] Leon Harris: Only on news 4.
A local family desperate for help after finding themselves caught up in a puppy scam.
[00:00:08] Faith McCreary: We drove five or six hours.
[00:00:11] Susan Hogan: Faith McCreary lives in Mount Airy, North Carolina.
[00:00:33] Rochelle Dallons: Can I help you?
[00:00:34] Paul Brady: It is like a psychotic lack of empathy.
I would be honest here.
I’m not saying that that is the scammer themselves, but that is the scammer mentality.
And, and they all adopt this.
So they, they will all go to whatever level that will get them money.
[00:00:51] Bob: Crime hurts us all.
The skepticism they breed hurts legitimate businesses and theft forces them to raise prices so consumers pay more.
It involves puppies and well let’s just get into the story.
[00:01:42] I was brought up in northern Virginia.
[00:02:28] Rochelle Dallons: It was you know, a very exciting time and everything.
And she’s like, this is perfect.
You have to meet me there.
So we came to the house, and she was right.
I mean, I saw it from the front, and I didn’t even have to go inside.
I, I was sold.
Went in, and it was just even better than I had imagined.
[00:03:30] Bob: You bought a house on Butterfly Pond.
[00:03:33] Rochelle Dallons: Yes.
[00:03:35] Bob: Ah, that just sounds so lovely.
Not long after Rochelle and her family moved in, there is a strange visitor.
[00:04:03] Rochelle Dallons: Yes.
And she said, “Yeah.”
And so she showed me all the paperwork and she was supposedly supposed to get a Pomeranian puppy.
And I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
[00:05:33] Bob: Someone had come to the door.
[00:06:25] Bob: On my God, you’re kidding!
[00:06:27] Rochelle Dallons: No.
[00:06:27] Bob: Wow.
[00:06:28] Rochelle Dallons: It was already out of service.
So that was our first experience.
[00:06:45] Bob: But soon, there are more knocks at the door.
I was just baffled that another one, right, another person was looking for a puppy now.
They had already paid money, and they drove in from Kansas.
So Kansas to Virginia is quite a long way.
So of course, she was devastated.
It was not good.
[00:08:20] Rochelle Dallons: Yes.
[00:08:26] Rochelle Dallons: Well I was crying by that time, too.
And, and I had to be the one to tell them that it wasn’t true.
[00:08:42] Bob: That just sounds awful.
[00:08:51] Rochelle Dallons: Oh yes.
[00:08:52] Bob: These visits are hardly a coincidence.
After talking with these three buyers, it’s obvious what’s happening.
Someone is selling puppies to people and sending the buyers to Rochelle’s house to pick them up.
But Rochelle has nothing to do with all this.
At first that doesn’t go so well.
So that was awkward.
I mean…
[00:09:50] Rochelle Dallons: Oh uh, yeah.
I didn’t get a warm fuzzy feeling from him.
Um, they change their website often.
Their, their business name is changed even.
So it’s very, very difficult for anybody to track them down.
Dozens more knocked at the door.
So I would get two or three people on Saturday, two or three people on Sunday.
Occasionally, I would get people during a workday, but not normally.
And I would have to go over it again and again and again.
So finally, I said, okay.
So I even had directions on like how to get there and what to do.
I mean did that every bother you?
[00:11:55] Rochelle Dallons: Yeah, I mean it did.
I’m like, uh, no.
And um…
[00:12:31] Bob: No puppies, no drugs.
[00:12:33] Rochelle Dallons: Right, no puppies, no drugs.
There also seems little hope of Rochelle enjoying that wrap around porch quietly on the weekends anymore.
Still, she keeps a positive attitude.
[00:13:15] Bob: Oh my God.
It, it was six months.
[00:13:32] Rochelle Dallons: You know I never thought that.
I love my house and I didn’t, I didn’t think that I was being targeted specifically.
And so the scammer thought, well hey, heres a nice big house.
I’ll use this address.
But they didn’t know that I had moved in, I guess.
So they were still sending all of these people to my home, and it wasn’t vacant.
I was having to, you know, talk to everybody.
So that’s, that’s how we think they found our house.
They, it was a vacant foreclosure, and they were using that address too.
So it wasn’t just me.
[00:14:38] Bob: So I feel so bad.
I mean here you’ve got this brand new house and you’re setting up this new life.
Wow, what a drastic step to have to take.
[00:14:54] Bob: Meanwhile, Rochelle is starting to suffer other consequences.
Collateral damage from this strange set of circumstances including some wild accusations.
So then what was happening was the police were coming to my door asking me questions.
It seems like it’s a different officer every time.
[00:16:03] Bob: So what did your neighbors thing about all this?
[00:16:05] Rochelle Dallons: (chuckles) Um, I often wondered that myself.
And she said, “Yes.”
What are they doing over there?
[00:17:08] Rochelle Dallons: Oh yeah.
[00:17:10] Bob: And there’s more.
The scam threatens to hurt her home business.
And that was just another…
[00:18:53] Bob: Absolutely.
Wow, that’s terrible.
[00:19:37] Rochelle Dallons: Um…
I would say 50.
[00:19:48] Rochelle Dallons: Oh yeah.
So it was always very emotionally charged.
[00:20:14] Rochelle Dallons: Yeah.
It, it was, it was really bad there for a while.
[00:20:39] Bob: And it isn’t getting an easier.
When Rochelle works with local police trying to straighten all this mess out, there’s a big problem.
According to the cops, there is no crime, at least not against Rochelle.
So there isn’t much they can do.
[00:21:13] Rochelle Dallons: Exactly.
[00:21:31] Rochelle Dallons: Oh yeah.
So that made it even more difficult.
I mean you were always worried about that.
I mean clearly you were a victim.
This is one of the problems with cybercrimes.
Our laws are just behind, I think.
[00:22:18] Rochelle Dallons: They are very much behind.
Rochelle calls the local NBC affiliate, WRC, to ask that her story be told.
So that’s when I contacted my local news.
[00:23:05] Bob: And this is WRC, right?
[00:23:07] Rochelle Dallons: Yes, Channel 4.
[00:23:08] Bob: The N–, the NBC folks, yeah, it’s Channel 4.
I, I used to work in the Channel 4 building, so I know it well.
[00:23:13] Rochelle Dallons: Oh wow.
[00:23:14] Bob: I’m very glad that, that you had a good experience with them.
I’m like, “Hey, Susan!
What’s up?”
[00:23:45] Leon Harris: Only on news 4.
A local family desperate for help after finding themselves caught up in a puppy scam.
Consumer reporter Susan Hogan has the story.
[00:24:07] Rochelle Dallons: Can I help you?
[00:24:08] Over the next several months victim after victim began showing up on their doorstep.
[00:24:16] Bob: And the story reported by Susan Hogan gets immediate attention.
Uh he explained to me why I had the problem of people not speaking to one another.
And so that was a little bit of a relief.
But the visitors, they just keep on coming.
So I would keep in communication with him every time something happened.
But this went on and on and on for probably close to a year.
[00:25:59] Bob: Close to a year?
[00:26:01] Rochelle Dallons: Yeah.
Yeah, close to a year.
They came from all over.
They put down all kinds of money.
And it was just, it was heartbreaking, honestly.
I just, I just wanted to get this, this situation to go away.
[00:26:28] Bob: So how does it go away?
There’s nothing dramatic, no final chapter.
It just fizzles out.
At least for now.
[00:26:39] Bob: So does this story end not with a bang but a whimper.
Do the, the, the visits just stop eventually?
[00:26:44] Rochelle Dallons: Yes.
It, there was not, there was no bang.
And I don’t know what triggered that.
I’m not sure.
So the scammer was actually not in the United States.
We think that they just changed addresses.
I don’t think that they caught him, honestly.
I think that he just moved along because I was creating trouble.
I wasn’t sure that taking my sign down was going to do any good.
Since I didn’t know the resolution, I don’t know if it will happen again.
I don’t know who, who I’m going to find out there.
We found an expert to give us some perspective on that.
Paul Brady runs PetScams.com, a site that chronicles fake and criminal puppy sales.
And he’s, well he’s definitely seen this before.
What you may have noticed is that Rochelle moved into the house about a month before.
I would guarantee you that address has been used for longer, uh, since before she moved in.
We have people coming to our door.
What can we do about it?
[00:30:51] Paul Brady.
So I’ve been involved in cybersecurity for the past, over, over 20 years now.
I was very involved in romance scams, and I was involved in 419 or advanced fee fraud.
However, it does now take up a, quite a lot of my time.
[00:31:51] Bob: Paul works out of Europe.
He says the puppy scams seem to work better on the US side of the pond.
[00:31:58] Paul Brady: I am actually based in Ireland.
So shipping’s a big part of this scam.
[00:32:39] Paul Brady: The scammers will ask a victim to travel to pick up the puppy.
Come down, pick it up.
They do it just out of spite.
I, I couldn’t stomach it.
I couldn’t stomach pretending to be someone that desperate.
They, they carried on.
It, it didn’t make a difference to them.
And they all adopt this.
So they, they will all go to whatever level that will get them money.
[00:34:12] Bob: And to be clear, there’s a lot of them.
[00:34:14] Bob: How many scams have you personally touched, or have you personally worked with?
[00:34:19] Paul Brady: It is a, a slightly different, difficult question to answer.
We have over 35, 40 thousand websites created by scammers listed on our, on petscams.com.
But we also include the, the shipping websites.
When they’re not all individual scammers, one scammer may have 20 or 30 websites.
There is one gang in South Africa that we are currently looking at, and they are targeting Australia.
[00:35:00] Bob: And plenty of these stories are really sad.
I think he’s got three kids.
And I spoke with him more than normal.
And I’m, I’m a father.
It, I, I know why he was buying the puppy.
[00:35:52] Bob: Here’s Paul’s best suggestion for would-be pet adopters.
Obviously, they can because they have a puppy.
They will give you a hundred different excuses.
I, I would like a video chat with you."
And scammers, scammers won’t.
And that stops the scam.
Who, who sent you here?
And this, this only applies on Google Maps.
It’s not with the IRS or anything.
But you’re able to put information onto Google Maps.
So what I recommend people do is say, this is part of a pet scam.
These are the details being used.
And it’s possible for you to fill out lots of information on there.
you’re able to contact us, and we can have it as part of Petscams.
So Petscams can be located uh, petscams.com can be located at your address.
And we have had several people do that in the past.
What happens then is Google will put that on their map.
And that breaks (inaudible) like nothing else.
Don’t come here basically, right?
It will show you the address.
It will show you the opening times, closing times.
So then the, the potential victims will not travel for six hours.
[00:39:41] Bob: Is there a downside to this?
[00:39:53] Paul Brady: There is.
It says it’s a pet scam, you know, I don’t believe you anymore.
They will ask you to confirm by sending you a postcard.
So you will receive a postcard with a 4-digits or 6-digits.
The scammer can’t hijack that.
That will do it.
You don’t have a need to have it on there continuously.
[00:41:12] Bob: That sounds really, really smart.
That’s a great piece of advice.
As I’ve said, scams often have more than one victim.
[00:41:30] Paul Brady: Well, there’s, there’s direct and indirect victims.
They didn’t have a Facebook page, and a scammer built them.
So that’s a very definite breeder who becomes a victim because their reputation is being ruined.
Victims, people are now so suspicious that that isn’t quite good enough.
[00:44:49] Bob: Rochelle has advice to offer after her experience too.
Like double-check that they know what’s happening every single step of the way.
And file the police report and call them all the time and bug them.
[00:45:31] Bob: So, run to the police, but also be persistent, right?
[00:45:35] Rochelle Dallons: Oh yeah, be persistent.
So you really have to be careful when you’re purchasing anything on the web.
Especially a live animal.
I hope you have a lot of peaceful afternoons on that porch going forward now.
[00:46:22] Rochelle Dallons: Yeah, well thank you so much.
This is the best house.
Call the AARP Fraud Watch web link Helpline at 877-908-3360.
Their trained fraud specialists can provide you with free support and guidance on what to do next.
Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
For AARP’s The Perfect Scam, I’m Bob Sullivan.
Some have driven over six or twelve hours with their family.
Even worse, over the course of a year, Rochelle finds herself accused of being the con artist.
Desperate, she turns to a local news station for help in putting an end to the scam.
