WARNING! Beware of sending money to Melissa Horn in France to purchase a dog - Page 2

An option is to give the airline in France a call or email them telling them about your situation and finding out how much it is in Euros and USD to ship the dog from France to Seattle yourself, to see if what she is saying matches up. I think this is the only way to know for sure if she is being truthful or not. You can also ask them how long in flight the dog would have to be and your concerns. This is what I would do in your situation anyway.

Well first of all Im soo sorry to hear about your loss.  This just happened to me from a seller off this website.  I lost $1600.  Its not only the loss of the money but the loss of trust of the website and people in general.  AND I lost a good dog or so I thought.  You fortunately sound like you have a person behind the name and actually admitting to the sale as I dont know as of yet.    If she quit taking your emails consider it a scam!  Follow all the suggestions for fraud.  Call the IC3, make a report through your local police department, their police department for their country,  the bank transfer company, email accounts etc..   Fraud is called by many names but in the end its fraud. 

 

CelticGlory and Cindy, thank you for the advice. We will be pursuing all avenues.

Another interesting point to note is that when we agreed to purchase the dog, there were no hip and elbow prelims done. Now, the dog has it noted that hip and elbow prelims are good. If Melissa was interested in finishing this transaction, I wouldn't expect her to be putting more money into the dog.

 

Absolutely!

Also, if nothing pans out depending on how you paid for the dog (paypal or bank), you can show proof to your bank or credit card company and they can see about filing a case to get your money back on their end. I had an issue with a transaction and they were willing to open up a case to get my money back to me.

My apologies on the 3 days...I misread the date.
Have you contacted the shipping company to see if that is a valid invoice? Not her fault shipping went up so much.
Hope this issue is resolved in your favor!

I must say it does sound like she is more legitimate in a since that you can find her on face book, ect as in website and so on. My guy not so much.. but the story is the same. Paid for the dog and when it came time to send I got a reason about United having bad reviews so he was going with another flight that was double the money. I heard the stories about us waiting for the Rabies ect as we all do when we ship but the end is the scam. She's got the money and the dog. However your gal doesn't really have any reason to stop communicating unless she's deceitful right? She'd otherwise just want to get the deal over with and move on as you as anyone doing good business. If I had someone slamming my good name over a mistake in business id be fixing it ASAP and I certainly wouldn't let that float around on the web for all to see when it wasn't true. Honestly I only see deceit. I could be wrong.. but id certainly act in your own best interest.

Cindy,

I am sorry to hear about this. We do our best to try and ban scammers. But there is no sure fire way to do this. We have warned people to be careful with purchases from overseas but it is pretty much impossible for us to know if an ad is real or a scam. As soon as a scammer is reported to us we take action on those accounts as soon as we can verify things.

 

You stated - "Its not only the loss of the money but the loss of trust of the website and people in general." I take slight offense to this because we have no way to know if a seller is a scam or not. We have admin who are very good at finding reported scammers but if a seller has never been reported, how do we know? You didn't know and neither do we. The site owner has promised you he will fully cooperate with IPs and removing this person from the site. Also, the OP has never stated that they met up with the person through PDB and I noticed in the PMs sent to mrdarcy that you keep trying to blame us and stated straight out how the OP lost money from this site, I don't think that has been proven at all. And being the person that ripped her/him off hasn't been on this site in almost 2 years I would find it hard believe it happened here. My guess is Facebook or working-dog. So, any site is vulnerable. Honestly, we all must take responsibility for our personal actions and blaming us is simply not accepting our own personal responsibilities.

 

In the near future classifieds are going to change. There will be a lot of complaints but we are proactive against scammers and we intend to make it harder on them to operate here. I do not want to go into details about possible change/ The site owner and admin take scammers very seriously so seriously we are going to change classifieds and risk disrupting a big part of the site to try and make it safer (but it will never be a 100%  perfect) here but there is only so much we can do and every buyer must use due diligence especially when dealing with overseas sellers.

 

OP, how did you find the person you are reporting here?

I apologize for not being clear about where I saw the dog listed for sale. It was on working-dog, not on PDB. I wanted to post here just in case the Melissa Horn ever posts dogs on here for sale as well.

I have reported this to working-dog, but have yet to hear back from them. So, thank you to the admins of PDB for being proactive in trying to keep the classifieds as safe as possible.

We did our homework, found Melissa's website, facebook page, looked for any negative reviews, etc. before sending any money to her. She seemed reputable and we could find nothing posted against her. After this incident, now at least two others have come forward with stories, but it was too late for us. People need to speak up or these individuals feel that they can keep getting away with unethical business practices.

Our position is we urge people to speak up. Because like I said above we can't try and stop them if we have no clue. Thank you for clarifying this and we will also look at blocking her from this site. Are you talking working-dog eu?