This cat’s full name is Bobert DeNiro, but to Haley Bradley of Bloomington and her family, he’s just “Benny.”
For a young cat, Bradley says, he’s not super adventurous. That made it shocking last Thursday when her daughter phoned her at work to say Benny was gone.
They drove the neighborhood looking for the cat, talked with neighbors, checked the animal shelter and posted on social media. They couldn't find him.
Late that night, the phone rang. Caller ID said it was Monroe County law enforcement.
“It said Monroe County Sheriff, so I panicked," Bradley said. "I answered the phone and there was a gentleman on the other end that said that he was with the sheriff's department and that they had located my male cat.”
It was a scam.
The supposed law enforcement officer told Bradley that Benny had been hit by a car.
"He listed off, you know, broken fibula and then a slipped disc in his back that was causing pressure and temporary paralysis," Bradley said.
"He said if we didn't act right away, this cat could possibly be permanently paralyzed.”
The scammer told her to wait for a call from the animal shelter. Soon Bradley’s phone rang again, showing the Humane Society's phone number.
A man who introduced himself as Daniel was on the line, telling her that in the morning she could pay for emergency surgery through PayPal or Zelle.
“It felt real, like this kind of stuff went on," she said. "And so he listed off a probably $2,400 price tag on this vet bill."
Daniel called her back the next morning to let Bradley know Benny’s surgery was successful and to arrange payment over the phone. She sent the money. He told her to pick up Benny from the shelter at 2 p.m. that day. Then the call dropped. Bradley called the shelter, but it was closed. She called the sheriff, and an officer told her they never found her cat.
Bradley realized she had been scammed.
"The most heartbreaking part is that it stopped us from looking for him for about 13 hours, because we thought he was in care of a vet, and he'd been outside," Bradley said. "I mean, we're dead of winter right now, and he'd been outside this entire time."
Lost pet scams are, unfortunately, common.
"Usually it's somebody who says that they found a person's cat and they want some money or just sort of sound fishy about what's going on," said Virgil Sauder, Director of Animal Care and Control for the City of Bloomington. "This is the first time at least I've personally heard of somebody posing as animal control or our shelter saying that they found the cat."
But it happens.
Web apps make it easy for scammers to imitate phone numbers and find personal information about pet owners. Sauder said when the shelter thinks it’s identified a lost pet’s owner, the next step is confirming in person.
"The first thing we tell people is to come in, because we want to see them here," he said. "We want to actually have them visually identify that this is their cat before we make it a 100 percent match."
Benny’s story has a happy ending. After Bradley realized she’d been scammed, she and her daughter hopped back in the car to resume the search.
"We ended up finding him within half an hour of the re-look," she said. "The next morning, she screamed, stopped the car, jumped out, and there he was under the trees and not injured, perfectly fine."
PayPal issued a refund, so Bradley didn’t lose money to the scam.
The Monroe County Sheriff’s Department says anyone with questions about a call from the agency should contact central dispatch or the sheriff’s department directly.
Public Information Officer Jeff Brown said in an email that the department shares information on social media about "the ever-growing list of scams that come out every day."
