SAN ANTONIO — San Antonio Animal Care Services is speaking out after they said a scammer tried to collect money from a woman who had lost her two dogs. ACS Spokeswoman Lisa Norwood said ACS would never call someone and demand payment over the phone or ask for payment over an app like Venmo, but that's what the scammer tried to do.
"A local pet owner got a phone call from someone pretending to be an ACS employee telling her that her dogs had come into ACS but they required a lot of medical assistance. They said before she could re-claim the dogs, she needed to spend payment via a digital payment platform."
Norwood said the caller asked for several hundred dollars. Fortunately, the woman called the Animal Care Services office directly about those demands and ACS staff was able to inform her that the communication was fraudulent. Norwood said the woman was frustrated and opted not to talk to media, but ACS needed to make others aware.
"It was so unusual and, frankly, so bold, that we wanted to make sure the community knew what was going on," Norwood said. "Because if they tried it once they will try it again."
Norwood said scams involving lost pets are, unfortunately, very common. Normally a scammer will call and claim they need a reward to return a pet while, in reality, they are just using information from a flyer or online post about the pet. Both ACS and SAPD provided some tips to stay safe when posting information about a pet.
- Put only a partial description of your pet in any lost ads so you can have callers fully describe your pet to you.
- When posting an ad, choose to include the vicinity or street on which your pet was lost instead of your home address in order to limit the amount of personal information put out.
- Go to Lost Dogs of Texas on Facebook and the website Lost.PetcoLove.org to create a free flyer and post on social media.
- Go to the Animal Care Services website to search for new pets ACS has recently found. ACS updates that site regularly.
Norwood said she had never heard of a scammer pretend to be an ACS employee before, but ACS wanted to get ahead of it.
"This sort of thing is disgusting. People are already grieving that their pet is lost, not sure if they are going to see the pet again, and you have unscrupulous people in the community trying to profit from that," Norwood said.