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Thefamilycompanions.com Reports & Reviews (1)

- Ashburn, VA, USA • Jul 01, 2023
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My family and I had started looking for a hypoallergenic puppy and stumbled across our scammer's site "The Family Companions" on June 22 around 3:00pm. That was when we saw a 11 week old Basenji puppy named Nikola on their website for $755 (His original pricing was $1,500, but was apparently on sale). We believed he would be perfect for our family so we sent an enquiry to the "breeder" using their website. They sent a text message back about 10 minutes later and stated that they sent an email with all his details. In this initial email, the scammer stated "We are pleased to inform you we still have Nikola available. We are located in Santa Maria, CA. Nevertheless, we do have transportation arrangements available to all states and parts of the US and Canada. His full cost is $755." This was when all the lies and problems started which we never truly understood until now. The scammer apparently goes by the name Anthony Hamilton. The scammer provided details about the puppies home conditions. He also talked about the personality of the puppy and how he's been family raised and that "Nikola is 80% potty trained and he knows how to use the potty pads. He doesn't portray any stubbornness since he is very intelligent and follows orders. He is playful but not destructive. He is socialized with kids and other household pets, especially dogs since we raise him with our kids and other pets. He is compassionate and likes cuddling on the couch with you while watching Tv." We exchanged multiple text messages throughout the course of this deal such as delivery details etc. Then we asked for pictures of the puppy. He stated that he didn't have any other photos at the moment other than the ones on the site since they just started selling the puppies the day we started our interaction. Now looking back it's shady that they couldn't have just taken a picture of him in their house. The day we decided to switch puppies and get a different one from the litter named Buddy. After he talked with us about the pricing and nudged us to pay the full amount, but we decided to only pay the $500 deposit like they said we could do on the site to secure the puppy. We asked more questions about the process and then we paid the deposit through Stripe online payment. Right after he prepared a sales agreement contract and we both signed. Then we had to start asking about updates on the puppies shipping status etc. This is when we noticed the scammer started to become slow to respond. He said he would email us starting Monday the 25th of June, which he did. But he had accidentally provided us with the previous buyer's tracking number and information on the site Tidy Drop Delivery by Swift Global Services. We messaged him then he gave us another tracking number. Later that day we paid the rest of the price for the puppy and the delivery troubles started. We found out on June 27th that the puppy would be delivered from Santa Maria, California to our home in Ashburn, Virginia the next day, since they have their own air freight system. But the next day the flight was cancelled due to "weather conditions". They said the delivery would be postponed to Friday the 30th. Then nearly 3 hours before he would get here, they supposedly arrived in Dallas, Texas and had a delay, so they would deliver the next day on Saturday the 1st of July at 10am. The day comes and its almost an hour past 10 and the scammers delivery company sends us an email stating that the puppy is in New York but is detained. They then continued to say that due to Virginia's immense pet population and loads of puppy mills that we would have to pay a $1,227 city permit fee, which is unusually high and we knew that there was no such thing. Right at the bottom of that email they attached an online payment portal from Stripe. That's when we noticed that this was definitely a scam, even though we were all holding onto hope that it wasn't. We texted the scammer and asked what the email was about and he basically said that the problem was on our side, with our state, and the fault wasn't his. But we picked up that they had unusually used the same payment site, so we decided to give a call to one of the previous buyer's to see if this truly was a scam. We ended up having a 5 minute phone call from a family who had purchased 2 Havanese puppies from this same "Breeder" but under a Texas Address. They told us that they never received the puppies and it 100% was a scam. We also noticed that the last email about the puppy being detained in New York had been sent to the previous buyer and had been copied and pasted to us since at the bottom of the email it stated "This message was sent to [email protected] in reference to transaction". We have been scammed.

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