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Animal lover pays for non-existent dog

“I read an ad on the internet from a Scottish lady who’d lost her husband and was struggling financially. She had to make a number of sacrifices, and the thing that upset her the most was not being able to take care of her dog any longer. He’d have to go to a dogs’ home and eventually get put down if nobody adopted him.

So she was appealing to people via free websites to give her dog a good home, but she said she couldn’t afford the transport costs to ship him to the new owner. I’m a dog lover and I also felt sorry for the woman, so agreed to adopt the dog and sent her the money to send him to me, which as you can imagine was quite a lot.

Turns out that loads of other people did the same thing and the whole thing was a scam. There wasn’t a dog and probably no Scottish lady either … just an organised criminal gang.”

Aziz, 30, Bolton