Tech giant Google has taken an unprecedented step by filing a consumer protection suit to protect vulnerable and unsuspecting people against a scheme the company has described as “nefarious”: selling adorable but imaginary puppies.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal district court in San Jose, California, accuses Nche Noel Ntse, a man from Cameroon, of defrauding potential puppy buyers using a variety of Google services, including Gmail accounts, Google Voice phone numbers and ads.
Ntse lured his victims with “adorable” and “charming” photos of purebred puppies, accompanied by “compelling testimonials from purportedly satisfied buyers”, to tap into the heightened demand for puppies that has sprung up in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to court documents.
Google said it spent more than $75,000 to “investigate and remedy” Ntse’s activities, and is suing him for financial compensation, citing damage to the company’s reputation and your relationship with users.
“What he did appears to be an especially outrageous abuse of our products,” Michael Trinh, a Google attorney, said Monday.
The company said it prevents 100 million potentially harmful emails from reaching users each day, but Trinh said he hoped the process would go further, making Ntse an example. Google decided not to file criminal charges against him because it believed a civil suit would be a quicker solution, Trinh added. “It’s an ongoing struggle.”
The case represents the first lawsuit filed by Google to protect consumers, said José Castaneda, a spokesman for the company. He added that, based on the vast network of websites operated by Ntse, Google estimated that his victims may have lost more than $1 million.
Google’s lawsuit comes after the pandemic has led to a surge in demand for puppies, as well as a growing number of fraudulent schemes to take advantage of that demand.
Last year, consumers reported losing more than $5.8 billion to fraud, up more than 70% from 2020, according to FTC data. ) from United States. Online commerce cheating has seen an especially strong rise during the pandemic, according to the Better Business Bureau. [equivalente americano do Procon]. The organization estimates that by 2021, pet-related fraud accounted for 35% of online commerce fraud reports.
Google first became aware of Ntse’s activities around September 221, after receiving an abuse complaint from AARP, an organization that advocates for older Americans.
According to the complaint, a person who lives in South Carolina and was looking for a dog contacted Ntse by email after visiting a website he operated, now closed. After corresponding with Ntse via email and text messages, the person sent $700 in electronic gift cards to the fraudster, according to the complaint, which adds that “Victim 1 never received the dog.”
According to the lawsuit documents, Ntse lives in Douala, a port city of more than two million people in Cameroon. He operated other websites, including one that allegedly sold marijuana and an opiate-containing cough syrup that was only supposed to be sold on prescription, the lawsuit claims.
“When you’re interested in buying a dog, you don’t think there’s a criminal on the other side of the transaction,” said Paul Brady, who runs the website PetScams.com, which tracks and reports sites that falsely claim to sell animals.
Fraudsters, many of whom live outside the United States, post photos and video of puppies and offer to sell them for low prices, demanding payment up front and sometimes invented additional costs such as animal quarantine fees and delivery fees.
These schemes have seen an “explosion” in the past two years, Brady said, with fraudsters taking advantage of people’s loneliness and lockdowns, which limited the ability to travel to pick up an animal.
“People were home alone and wanted an animal for company,” he added, recalling an especially shocking incident in which a woman spent $25,000 trying to acquire a Pomeranian.
For Rael Raskovich, 28, the experience of being defrauded in an online pet-buying scheme was devastating.
About a year ago, Raskovich, who works at a mortgage institution, had just moved to South Carolina and wanted to buy his first dog: a golden retriever.
She studied her options, and ended up filling out an online form, on a website that has since gone live, and it included detailed questions about her plans to care for the animal, she said, which led her to believe the procedure was legitimate.
She transferred $700 to the seller, who sent her a video of the dog she imagined she would soon receive. She bought toys and a dog bed.
Then, Raskovich said, the seller said he needed an additional $1,300 to vaccinate the animal against the coronavirus, and for an air-conditioned shipping container. Raskovich said she was told she would get a call from Delta Air Lines, which the seller said would transport the animal — but when she called to confirm, the airline informed her that it does not transport animals.
“That’s when I knew it was definitely not legitimate,” she said, adding that she cut off communication with the alleged seller, whose identity has never been determined.
“You get ready for something new in your life,” Raskovich said. “It was awful”.
Translation by Paulo Migliacci
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