Purchasing a French Bulldog - Web Sites and On Line Puppy for Sale Sites
| Buying from a Breeder | Buying from a Pet Store | Buying from On Line Sites | Buying from a Broker | Buying from a Puppy Mill
Many ethical breeders now have websites
to introduce prospective purchasers to their dogs, their breeding programs
and their available puppies. In fact, websites can be a quick and useful
way to amass a list of potential breeders you are interested in contacting
about possibly purchasing a puppy. What potential owners need to be aware
of are the differences between these sites, and sites we like to describe
as 'on line puppy classified' web sites.
On line puppy classified sites have made a huge splash in the on line
market in the past few years. Doing a search for the term 'dog breeder'
or 'puppies for sale' for almost any breed of dog turn up the same results,
over and over again. Sites with names like 'PuppyFind', Pets4U', 'TerrificPets'
and 'NextDayPets' all look like simple, easy to use solutions to your
pet buying dilemma. Just search your breed and your area, and voila!
Page after page of cute puppy pictures, all available to you with just
the click of a mouse. Most of the puppies are described as coming from
'caring' breeders, the term most buyers know to look for. The clean,
well laid out look of these web sites can instill a false sense of security
in buyers who've come to associate well laid out web sites with well
run businesses. If you can trust sites like Amazon and eBay to provide
you with quality goods, why not sites like puppyfind? The difference,
of course, is a crucial one - puppies are live animals, not books, and
selling them requires more than just an exchange of money for goods.
Puppyfind and similar sites make it very clear, albeit in fine print,
that they are merely an ad source. They do not screen or qualify advertisers
in any way whatsoever, nor do they vouch that the goods they are selling
are quality, or even what they are advertised to be. The term 'buyer
beware' takes on an entirely new meaning when it's applied to purchases
from sites like this.
Quality breeders have long waiting lists for their available and planned
litters. They don't need to resort to hawking their puppies through anonymous
sites like PuppyFind, and few would be caught dead with a dog they've
bred listed there. For some people, though, the anonymity of sites like
these is ideal.
What follows is an indepth breakdown of some the people you are likely
to find via puppy for sale type classified sites.
Re-Sellers
As we mentioned in our section on brokers,
less than healthy dogs, which are called 'class B' dogs, are often bought
in bulk purchases by re-sellers. In the past, these dogs were sold at
flea markets, or through seedier pet stores. Now, many of them are sold
through on line puppy for sale sites. After all, buyers can't see where
the dogs are being kept, and they don't usually ask to see the parents.
It's even rarer for the people using puppy classified sites to think
to ask to visit the 'breeder', when shipping is so readily and eagerly
offered. Sellers don't even have to keep the puppies on hand - they wait
until the orders come in, and then pick up what's needed from the broker
warehouse facilities. Lower over head equals greater profits, and when
the complaints about sick puppies come in, along with the threats of
lawsuits, they simply change 'kennel names' and ad sites, and move on
to scamming a new set of victims.
Brokers
As with the re-sellers mentioned above, many brokers are now discovering
how simple it is to re-sell cheap European puppies for high North American
prices thanks to anonymous puppy classified sites. Few volunteer that
they aren't the actual breeders of the dogs, or, if they do, they claim
to be selling them for a relative who breeds top champions, but has little
command of English, and all out of the goodness of their hearts. Some
on line brokers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year,
and all thanks to sites like puppyfind. The fact that many, if not most,
of the dogs they sell are sickly is no impediment to their profit level,
thanks to a health 'gaurantee' that offers little more than a partial
refund for the return of a sick or dying puppy.
BYB-ers
In the past, back yard breeders had
to resort to ads in the local papers. Thanks to the internet, they can
now sell their pups to a world wide market of eager and naive buyers.
Buying a puppy on line from a BYB-er is just as risky as buying from
one that lives down the street, with the added bonus that, if something
goes wrong, you now get to try and track down someone who lives across
the country, instead of some one who lives down the street. Good luck
with that!
Puppy Mills
In the past, puppy mills had to sell their pets via brokers, or direct
to pet stores. After all, no one who saw their facilities would ever
want to bring one of those puppies home. No more worries about that,
though, now that on line puppy for sale sites are here! Puppy mills can
hide their squalid, over crowded, filthy conditions easily, behind glibly
written ad copy that touts 'family raised pups'. Since, again, few buyers
bother to even ask about visiting the buyer's location, mills can skip
the middleman and get the kind of hyped price that pet stores have been
able to command for years.
Purchasing from someone who claims to be a 'caring breeder' from an
on line classified ad type website, without doing your homework and visiting
their facility, is no different from supporting puppy mills in any other
way. Research breeders you find via these types of websites just as thoroughly
- if not more so - than you would any other breeder. This includes insisting on
visiting their facility to pick your puppy up in person. Don't
be surprised if your doing so suddenly results in the deal being called
off altogether.
Phantom Puppies
One of the most disturbing new trends of the on line puppy classified
sites is the ease with which they can be used to perpetrate something
that's been referred to as the 'phantom
puppy scam'. In the phantom puppy scam, 'sellers' list dozens of
photos of puppies which are for sale at drastically low prices. The sellers
only accepted method of payment is western union, a payment method which,
when 'no signature' is specified, is completely anonymous and untraceable,
and can be picked up at any location in the world. Sellers receive payment,
and then disappear, leaving the purchasers without a dog, or a method
of determining who they were scammed by. Once scammers have sold the
same puppy a few times over, they remove the ad and place one for a new
breed, starting the cycle all over again. PuppyFind allows users to place
free 'trial ads', allowing the scammers to escape the paper trail which
paying for an ad would create.
Families across North America have been left heart broken and angry
after being ripped off by these unethical scam artists, and puppyfind
alone has page after page of complaints from purchasers who were scammed
by sellers advertising on their site. Read this
story of one man who lost his money to a puppyfind scam artist. Dozens
more complaints can be found on RipOffReport.com -
just search for 'puppyfind.com' and 'scam'.
Scammers obtain their photos by stealing them off of the websites of
legitimate breeders, a situation which puppy classified sites aren't
exactly in a great hurry to correct, even when they're notified of the
situation. French Bulldog breeders have reported sending literally dozens
of emails, over as much as two weeks, before the offending ads are removed.
Emailing the sellers themselves receives no response whatsoever, since,
again, it's almost impossible to track down who or where they are. Even
when the sites do remove their ads, they simply place new ones back on
line within a few hours.
Summation:
While there may in fact be some legitimate breeders who advertize on
these types of sites, they are far outweighed and outnumbered by bad
breeders, puppy mills, import brokers and scam artists. Purchasing via
this method is a proverbial crap shoot, and we do NOT advocate that you
do so.
Links to additional stories and complaints:
PuppyFindSucks.Com - stories of puppyfind.com scams and complaints
Bolognese
Buyer Loses $485 to PuppyFind.Com scammer
PuppyFind.Com
refuses to remove fraudulent photos
Bulldog
buyer scammed out of $1000 via puppyfind.com
Chihuahua
Bought Via TerrificPets fatally ill, breeder won't replace or refund
Scammed
out of $1000 via pets4u |
