I Have Heard Of CAT Scans,

but now a first for me, cat scams,

above a genuine Sphynx kitten, we pictured it on our blog last week, in case you are wondering they are expensive, and in the States and Canada usually sell for $1,000 to $1,500 upwards, so when Shayla Bastarache, from Alberta, Canada, saw an ad for a Sphynx kitten for just $650, last month, there was no photo attached to the ad, she agreed to meet the seller in a gas station parking lot an hour north of Calgary, at night, She handed him the money and received two hairless kittens, one for herself and one for a friend, Bastarache says she only realised that she had been scammed two weeks later, when both felines grew a thick coat and were revealed to be regular house cats,

soon after Shayla Bastarache’s case was reported by Canadian media, another woman cam forward with a similar story, Holly Rattray had posted an ad on Canadian free classifieds site Kijji, looking to purchase a hairless Sphynx, She was approached by a person called Tim, who offered to sell her a Sphynx kitten for just $700, Holly remembers that the woman she met in a parking lot seemed to be in a big hurry, and even accepted $550 for the cat, instead of the agreed $700, the same thing happened, the kitten grew hair, 

after discovering that she had been scammed, Holly did some online research and discovered a Facebook post by yet another Alberta woman who had fallen for the same trick, JoAnne Dyck had also bought what she though was a Sphynx kitten online, at an unusually low price – $700, both JoAnne Dyck and Shaniya Yung contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police about the scam, but were rebuffed because they didn’t have the seller’s information, and the supplied cell number wasn’t working anymore, so the advice from JoAnne Dyck is that the only way to avoid getting scammed is to buy Sphynx cats from reputable breeders, even if the price is considerably higher, cat scams who would have thought it?