Online dog scams

[DogsAndTheMob]

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9l74wvd7o

BBC uncovers the scammers exploiting dogs to elicit donations from animal lovers

 

 

Edited May 4 by DogsAndTheMob

[Little Gifts]

I couldn't even read all  the way through. The thought of that turns my stomach.

[_PL_]

I found a few 'rescue' scammers the other day FB & Tiktok. Thousands of followers. All stolen videos of sick and injured animals, with a call for money. All linked by the same phone number. And astoundingly, people were throwing money at them! Where is the common sense? 

[PossumCorner]

On 05/05/2026 at 9:31 AM, _PL_ said:

......  And astoundingly, people were throwing money at them! Where is the common sense? 

Couldn't agree more, is fb rotting brains??  All the AI written half-a-book tales of something totally soppy accompanied by an orange-washed AI image of someone with an animal: all so obviously contrived and faked stories - like old-time Readers Digest garbage on steroids.  Yet 100s of 1000s give gooey responses without realising their emotions are being manipulated/controlled by total dishonesty. 

 

Probably the same lack of common sense that just gave us an election result, alongside the larger one in the UK.  Might seem the two issues are unrelated, but I think fb and its effect are a very common denominator. 

[DogsAndTheMob]

On 5/5/2026 at 9:31 AM, _PL_ said:

And astoundingly, people were throwing money at them! Where is the common sense? 

Fools and their money are soon parted, indeed! But the animals are the real victims. Increasingly, causes are marketed for financial gain, with no consideration for the animals’ suffering. Some of them are obviously not in the animals best interest, like the three-legged foal being kept alive in the US. Others are not so obvious; I look sceptically at an elephant sanctuary that occasionally appears in my FB feed. The elephants look so thin that I wonder if they’re confined to the sanctuary or lured to stay there by nutritionally inadequate hand feeding, when wider roaming would be in their best interest. I try not to engage with those posts in any way, because the in FB algorithm, engagement = profit.

 

The other cause from which we’re thankfully insulated in Australia is international dog rescue. For a while, international dog rescue from third world countries was heavily promoted in a North American forum for a popular dog breed, and skeptics were slammed. I didn’t get involved in the debate, but I worried that even if they were initially rescuing true strays or meat market dogs, the potential for profit would create an industry of breeding or stealing dogs for the rescue market. 

Edited May 10 by DogsAndTheMob

[Mairead]

There is a recent clip by a channel called Raleigh Link (her name + name of her horse) called "Animals Aren't Dying Anymore ... WTF" about shelters allowing animals to have a very poor quality of life rather than putting them down. Examples: foal born without a front leg, paralysed sheep lying on a wheeled contraption. 

Edit: I discovered there are many paralysed sheep that have been kept on trollies for YEARS. 

Edited May 10 by Mairead