I am signed up to receive alerts when adverts are placed with the Sun Local advertising. I keep being sent alerts for puppies which are scams, a person lists lots of breeds at low prices to get people to send money for transport. I keep reporting these adverts as scams but the Sun does not seem to remove the ads and I never get a response to my emails.
Surely it is illegal to run these ads? today they are advertising pit bulls. Does anyone know how I can get these ads removed?

Perhaps reporting to the Police for ileagal breeds and fraud.

i've reported them several times too. still no action taken to remove the ads..

ive seen the same for my breed nd have reported to trading standards along with copies of the emails ive received from the scammer when ive asked some questions about the pups.....they never do anything about it though :(

can't understand why nobody in authority done anything, as i said earlier i'm always reporting them.

This is a part of a big international fraud to get money from people and get their crdit card details, it was highlighted on Radio Four yesterday (although they were talking of goods for sale not dogs) I wrote an article on this in Our Dogs last year. Can you send me a contact telephone for your local Sun News? I am following the article up at the moment and would like to check out the adverts.

You would be surprised how many people fall for this and lose their money, It is a world wide scam.

Sun Local is like a search engine for adverts and pulls in ads from a lot of different places such as Oodle, Gumtree as well as Trade-It and Champdogs too. Most of the scams I have seen (and reported) originate on little-known ad sites like Mobiya and Inetgiant. Like the above poster, they are almost never withdrawn and I have never had any kind of feedback from them after reporting them to the ad site for spam/fraud.

If you (or anyone else reading this) hasn't ever looked at Sun Local - here's a random search I've just done (hope it works):
http://pets.local.thesun.co.uk/all/for-sale/pet_breed_pug/?oldq=pug&inbs=1

I typed in "Pug" and was not surprised to see quite a few advertised as Free or well under £200. I think most people here know how much they usually go for, even pet/BYB. You can bet the cheap ones are a scam. If you follow up the ads and sound genuine, after about 2 emails you'll find they have suddenly moved to the Outer Hebrides, the Isle of Man, or Northern Ireland and want to send you the puppy by courier.

PS: the ads and replies are usually oddly-worded - speaking about 'potty trained', having all 'shots', 'health guaranteed' and in some cases AKC or UKC reg! If you trawl through the cat ads (try Bengal) you will often see photos and/or wording - plus sometimes cattery names lifted from genuine American catteries - and often kittens advertised as being "KC reg"!! I once followed up a suspected scam kitten ad, and recieved an email back asking me when I would like the puppy delivered!

Me too... there is a free add site advertising puppies I sifted over 20,000 adverts and probably 19,000 were the same format and quite clearly scams :-(

> Me too... there is a free add site advertising puppies I sifted over 20,000 adverts and probably 19,000 were the same format and quite clearly scams

Have to say one or two have made me laugh out loud - a photo of these supposedly for-sale pups, taken in a leafy sunny garden, when the place in the UK they were meant to be located had been under a foot of snow for four weeks....!

or even better google said breed and the first image that comes up are these puppies lol.

Found one with a picture taken from my website claiming my boy was the sire!

> person lists lots of breeds at low prices to get people to send money for transport

Nothing new, it's been going on for many years.  And many people appear to earn enough from it to make a very nice living.

I have had people ask me for a puppy "cheap or free" as they have sent of a couple of hundred pounds and lost it.  Why they believe there is such a thing as a cheap puppy is beyond me, but they happily send off the transport costs.

A fool and his money is soon parted.

one of these adverts were offering bergamasco's for £200.....................  how ridiculous, they dont even research the breeds 

they do come up with very inventive reasons for why you cannot collect the dogs, i have emailed a few just for the wind up value!

seen one for G.S.Ds. claiming had been hip scored (at 6 months)

I think I have something the owners of these sites may have overlooked. If they have been notified that the advert is a fraud and they do not remove it, within a reasonable period of time, I would say 48 hours is reasonable, then they are complicit in aiding and abetting the fraud. As it was found through their search engine or website, if they do not remove it then people who have lost money could have recourse against them, as they continued to refer people to the advert, KNOWING it was a fraud or in all likelihood a fraud.

They then can be accused of aiding and abetting by failing to take reasonable action. I also wind these scamemrs up and here are some useful facts. Ireland is in the Orkneys as well as being an island. Always own a holiday home and have staff there (personally I have a holiday cottage on the Isle of Man, the Isle of Wight, a shooting lodge in Pitlochry, a hotel I own in Belfast and a major printing works in Dublin, I also have a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter - being a veteran of the Vietnam war, special operations, a 210 foot motor yacht and a nose that is 9 miles long). Always set up and use a fake email account (so far I have been Hannibal Smith, Captain H.M. Murdoch, Templeton Peck and Bosco Albert Baracus, not to mention James Tiberius Kirk). String them along then squeeze them, if we tie these people up in their own email scam then they might lose the taste for it.

I did a casual search for my breed and came up with free puppies and very low priced ones. 

As puppies are very thin on the Gounod, like Rocking horse poo, there is no way that even unregistered pups would be free, as we have owners wanting pets waiting months and months on waiting lists.