Friesian horse scams?

[dianneS]

Perhaps the rest of you are aware of this. I just came across this for the first time. I was looking at Horstopia.com ads and came across a whole list of ads for two Friesians for FREE! All the ads were the same, they had odd information and the horses were only 15.1hh?? There were even a few ads that had horses listed at 29"?? (Are there mini Friesians that I wasn't aware of, because I've always said that my mini looks like a tiny Fresian when he moves really cute!)

Anyway, I got suspicious and had to email the seller. "She" calls herself Melissa and lives in California, but would only disclose her location after I told her where I was located. Her email was in broken english and had odd information for a fellow horse person. She wants to ship the horses to me sight-unseen for just the cost of shipping. Of course she wants me to either wire money or give her my credit card number. Of course there are no horses.

Just wondering if anyone else has come across these ads? I think we need to spread the word and put these people out of business. Its obviously a scam just looking at the ads, you can tell you're not dealing with a very horse knowledgable person. When they start communicating with you though, they become really nice and friendly and try to win you over.

I just don't want to see anyone actually get ripped off by these people!

 

[michickenwrangler]

I've seen those before. Just a scam like so many others out there.

 

[dianneS]

Well, I continued my dialog with the Friesian scammers. I really thought that when my questions became more and more persistent and suspicious that they would just give up on me and realize that I was on to them, but they seemed to think I was really going to wire them $1500!

I finally just told this person that I was on to their scam and I'm going to spread the word to everyone I know in the horse world to steer clear of these people. I got a lovely pair of words in response, nothing I could share here, but you get the idea! I really ticked them off, getting them so excited that they thought they had a sucker on the line and wasting so much of their time!

It was comical, but still very serious and I would hate to see someone get ripped off by them.

One interesting similarity to a furniture scammer that replied to an ad on craigslist that I had posted, was that the more exchanges we had, the sweeter the other person became, calling me "Dear" and things like that. They really try to earn your trust, but the ads are so ridiculous and these people obviously know nothing about horses, it would be hard to fall for their scam.

 

[miss_thenorth]

We used to get ads similar on our kijiji 9cdn version of your craigslist) form htings like horse trailers, camper trailers motorbikes etc for relly low prices. If youcontact the site --horstopia, could they ban the ads? We could flag them on kijiji

 

[patandchickens]

Like most scams, it is mainly a trap for the greedy, so there is a *certain* amount of justice to anyone falling for it, IMO. (Exception being those not fully competent to manage their own affairs in the first place, including but not entirely limited to some of the elderly)

There is someone out there on the Web who has a good-sized site devoted to recounting their playing cat-and-mouse with nigerian email scammers... in some cases getting them wound all the way up to setting up a meeting in person and taking photos of the scammers (or anyhow their representative).

But, really, you can report them to whateve board etc the ad was on, but it does not really matter, there are bazillions of them out there and when you cut one head off another twelve just re-sprout. People just need to learn not to greedily FALL for such things, is the only thing gonna make 'em cut it out. (Lets all hold our breath shall we )

(15.1 is a perfectly plausible height for a Friesian horse, though.)

Pat

 

[dianneS]

I discovered that dreamhorse.com has a page with information regarding the friesian horse scammers and gave advice on how to recognize their ads. They said that the ads say things like "healthy horse, sweet and playful, cute and adorable, perfect addition to your family" like they are puppies or kittens or something! Those ads do say that type of stuff too, that's what struck me as odd about the whole thing.

Horstopia doesn't have a flag button, but they should. There is a huge long list of these ads, just one after the other and they've been there for months. I saw these ads a long time ago, but looked them up again recently when a friend of mine and I were talking about horse scammers. The ads were still there and they were still as suspicious looking as before.

I got a good laugh from dealing with this so-called seller and I really ticked "her"off when I told her that even for a scam artist, she's not a very good one! That hit a nerve! She called herself an old MAN in one email, then signed the email MELISSA!!