Scammers on The Homestead
Scammers are all over and they try to take advantage of buyers and sellers. Join us as we talk about the different types of scams and how to spot them.
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Carey: 0:01
Hi, and welcome to the Poultry Nerds Podcast. I'm Carey Blackmon, here with my co host for the show, Jennifer Bryant. We're here to help you figure out how to raise the healthiest, happiest, and highest quality birds possible.
Intro: 0:14
Mhm.
Carey: 0:23
Today we're going to talk about what's getting to be more and more of a problem on the homestead. Scammers, people trying to scam the farmers and stuff like that. And all the scammers that are related and in the poultry industry, we're going to touch on some of those and some of the ways that you can protect yourself. How are you doing today, Jennifer?
Jennifer: 0:44
I'm good. I haven't been scammed yet this year. Have you?
Carey: 0:50
No. I've had some pretty colorful attempts. I have had. I've had all kinds of stuff. But no, I'm so most people don't know, but by day, my big boy job is I teach cybersecurity and networking at one of the local high schools. So I have a little bit of an advantage than what a lot of people do. And we'll talk about some of that stuff today. And, you and I talked, what this, when did we come up with this idea about three weeks ago, maybe?
Jennifer: 1:25
Yeah,
Carey: 1:26
We were comparing the different messages and stuff like that, that we had gotten. And we thought that it would be a good idea to share. So we'll let's share what are, what's one of the ones that, what was the one that you were telling me about when we originally. Started the conversation.
Jennifer: 1:45
So I had a pretty elaborate scam happened to me last week, actually, but I want to save that one for the end. So for, because that was, let's start at the easy ones and work up to these elaborate ones. The easy ones would just be, people convincing someone to Venmo them a hundred bucks for some eggs. And the buyer doesn't do their due diligence to make sure they're a legitimate seller, that they even exist, that there's even chickens. So in my opinion, that would be 50 percent the scammer and 50 percent the buyer's fault, in all honesty.
Carey: 2:29
Yeah, because a lot of times in a lot of the chicken groups, I see people They just ask, Hey, does anybody have such and such? They're looking for hatching eggs for, a green legged silky or whatever it is. And within the first couple of posts, you'll see, I bought such and such from so and doing business with them was absolutely amazing. Check them out at dah.
Jennifer: 2:55
Kindly inbox me.
Carey: 2:58
Yeah. Kindly inbox me.
Jennifer: 3:01
So if you say kindly inbox me, run away.
Carey: 3:07
We're all, we're, most of us are chicken people. And how many of us use the word kindly drop me an email. Kindly send me a text message.
Jennifer: 3:16
Yeah, that's
Carey: 3:17
definitely a red flag.
Jennifer: 3:19
I can't say that I've ever said that actually in my lifetime. I'm suspecting that is something through a translator that is doing that. Just a suspicion on my part though. So that would be just the quickest scam to get the most the most naive people out of their a hundred bucks. I think the next one would be where they then say, Hey, I need 50 more bucks for the shipping company.
Carey: 3:51
Yeah. Who uses a shipping company? Like that. I'm like a shipping company. Do you mean FedEx?
Jennifer: 4:03
So there is no shipping companies. Your choices for shipping live birds, you only have two choices. One would be express you post office express. And then the second one would be a private transport company. And there are, what, I don't know, maybe a dozen of those around I've dealt with one.
Carey: 4:27
They do exist.
Jennifer: 4:30
Yeah. You can get easily get references on them, but just general shipping company terms is no, that's not how that works.
Carey: 4:41
And I've even heard of people talk about. They've been sent to these websites and I was given a tracking number that, yeah, and I've seen screenshots of these ultra cheesy. shipping companies that, you put in any number and it gives you the same vague in route to stuck at your neighboring states border. needs additional funds to cross the border. I'm sorry, but if you're going from Alabama to Tennessee, there's nothing there at that state line, not the border, because that's not how we talk. So that should be another red flag. They have way stations for commercial vehicles to stop and weigh, but they don't have a place for you to stop with poultry to check them at the border. So You know if for some reason you do get hooked into something and somebody starts telling you they need additional money to get across the state border, let that be a red flag for sure.
Jennifer: 5:53
All right. So the next, so just don't randomly send people a hundred bucks and definitely don't send them 50 more for a shipping company. Just cut your losses at the a hundred bucks and move on. Now, the next thing would be. The most popular one out there is the Davis farm. Davis farm chickens. Davis farm quail. The Davis farm has been around, I don't know, two or three seasons now, and people are still sending them money. Yeah, you hear about that one a lot. Chickens near you. Anything like that. Birds near you. Those are all scammers. We don't talk like that.
Carey: 6:36
And When somebody I'm not saying that they can't be legitimate and not have a website or at least a corny website, if you're ordering birds from somebody that shipping you birds, do some homework. Usually if you're ordering from an individual like that, there's a lot of cases where it's a specific type a modeled seacrested Orpington or, something like that. And this particular breeder says that they have it. Check that person out. If they're a reputable breeder, maybe they're a APA member or they have a website that has their NPIP number on it. I'm not saying that you have to have an NPIP to be a reputable breeder, but if you look at the flip side, why would you not? Because technically speaking, if you want to legally ship eggs or birds across state lines, You've got to have one. So if the person doesn't have it, that should be a red flag.
Jennifer: 7:49
And that's a good starting point. NPIP. is not a secret. You can. Anybody can go to the NPIP database. Just Google it. It'll come up. You can search by state. You can put in the number. You can put in the person's name, the address and all of that stuff is public record. Eso if anybody tells you that their M. P. I. P. Number is A secret? It is not a secret. Mine is 63-1120. All of y'all can have one. I write it on every box. I write it on all my pamphlets. It's on everything. It goes with me to shows. It's just like your driver's license number. It's not a secret. And if you go to somebody's
Carey: 8:33
willing to act like it's a secret, I that, that gives you my personal information, then clearly they don't have a clue that you can Google NPIP top in any bit of the information that somebody put on their license application. And now you have it all.
Jennifer: 8:52
Yeah. So that would be, I think, step one. It's not the end all be all, but that is, somebody refuses to give you their NPIP number, then that's a red flag, you need to walk away from them. Then if you do get it, look it up. And see if it matches. And if it does Google Earth the address. And see if it's real. I saw one the other day, and they went to go pick up, and they were at an old decrepit furniture store out in the hills. East Tennessee. Maps is your friend. You can do all of this without leaving the couch. Okay. So if you're going to spend a hundred dollars, let's say you're going to spend a hundred dollars on eggs. My opinion is Figure out how long it takes you to earn a hundred dollars and spend at least that amount of time researching the breed, the breeder, and how they're shipping it to you, because. Yeah,
Carey: 9:54
because if they're a reputable breeder and they should be charging a hundred dollars for a dozen eggs, they should be at least remotely well known.
Jennifer: 10:07
Yes, but don't bother them 50 times. So just a side note here, don't ask for 50 gazillion pictures because you're just not even going to get the chance to buy the 100 eggs if they are legitimate. So you have to do some of this on your own, but then, so next step, you're going to look at the person's pages. Now you can't go buy followers anymore because a lot of people don't realize that you can just go on the internet and buy followers for a dollar. So if they have an even number of followers 1700 and you come back tomorrow and it's still 1700 probably not legitimate. And if they have 1700 followers, which a lot of them have 1700, I've noticed, I don't understand what the magic number of 1700 is. I
Carey: 10:54
wonder if that's the$9.99 starter pack when you buy followers.
Jennifer: 10:59
Maybe it is. And then goes to their posts. Just scroll down 10 posts, say, and first of all, you're looking for angry faces. So angry faces is our way of telling you that this is a scammer. So if you see the top 10 posts all have angry faces, then that's what's going on there. If they have 1700 followers, they should have more than two likes or thumbs up or whatever on their top 10 posts. I mean, it's what is it? Like 10 percent net followers or something. So 1, 700 followers, at least 17 likes, on their post or whatnot. That would be 1 percent wouldn't it?
Carey: 11:44
I was going to say that'd be 1%, but we're not mathematicians.
Jennifer: 11:47
Yeah, we're not, you get what I'm saying. You don't have 1700 followers and only two. And they would probably be foreign names to look and see who's commenting and posting,
Carey: 11:57
When you look at those comments and post to see who they are, see if it looks like a robot type them, look at the wording that they use. Is that how you talk?
Jennifer: 12:10
They shouldn't have. 47 different breeds with all of the variety of colors. And if somebody does have 47 breeds, you don't really want their birds anyway. I'm sorry if that offends anybody, but
Carey: 12:27
Somebody has that. If you have, a breeder that I'm gonna say more than five breeds. If they don't have at least a couple full time staff members and a decent chunk of land, then they're not breeders. They're hatchers.
Jennifer: 12:53
Yeah, you might as well just buy from a hatchery.
Carey: 12:56
Save yourself some money.
Jennifer: 12:58
Yeah, and know that it's not a scammer.
Carey: 13:01
Yeah.
Jennifer: 13:01
Because you just can't put that much effort into that many breeds and do a good job. You can keep them alive, and you can physically have 47 breeds,
13:15
but
Jennifer: 13:15
they're not going to be what's the word I'm looking for quality. SLP for sure not.
Carey: 13:22
And I can say that from experience because when I first started getting back into poultry, I had these and I had these that I liked, but I also wanted to have quite a few others. And as I, I got all that set up and got infrastructure set up. I found out that, I'm one person
13:41
and
Carey: 13:42
I can't work with all these birds and make the selection that I need to select and do the things that I need to do. So now I've withered it down to three and three is a stretch for me. But it's three that I'm passionate about continuing that bloodline of that bird. The rest of the ones that I had have since gone on to either greener pastures or tabletops.
Jennifer: 14:13
And how many pens do you have?
Carey: 14:15
I have 16 breeding pens and five grow out pens, but now, with the program that I have now with my breeders. I may have no more than three or four birds in a breeding pen because I'm targeting certain things. Like I have one beautiful bird that has a crooked comb on the rooster and on the hens, they have perfectly straight combs that they got the right number of points, everything's great. So I know when I breed those birds together, the offspring is going to have perfect combs because they're going to inherit that from the hen, not from the rooster. I'm doing that type thing with those and, yes, you can hatch at a 10 to one ratio or 15 to one ratio, but you can't breed to that big of a ratio because you don't know what the crap you're breeding.
Jennifer: 15:17
That would, you basically just made my point that you can't have 47 breeds and Right.
Carey: 15:23
And that I wanted to say that so people know, Hey, this is why we say you can't, and this is my experience when I tried, because I don't like for people to tell me I can't, I wanna, don't tell me. Yeah. I can't. You can't productively do that.
Jennifer: 15:40
I have 28 pens and I only have two breeds in. one color each. And at max capacity, I am using all 28 pens. This time of year, I'm not. But here in a little bit I will have even more out there because the grow outs will be going out here soon. So different, we've went down a rabbit hole. Me and you like rabbit holes, don't we? Imagine that.
16:06
Okay.
Jennifer: 16:06
So anyway, so stay away from the people with 47 breeds just because you might as well just buy from a hatchery because then you don't have to even worry about if they're a scammer. And no, none of their eggs are worth a hundred dollars a dozen anyway. And they're going to tell
Carey: 16:21
you they are.
Jennifer: 16:23
Yeah. Yeah. So let's see, what's next on. So after you do decide that they're worth going into chat mode with, so you vetted them, you, you're comfortable with their Facebook page and their reputation. And don't forget, you can use the search function on Facebook and look them up. You can also look in the good egg, bad egg. Which I love to be a spectator in there, but golly, I hope my name's never brought up in there. I'll
Carey: 16:54
read through, I'll read through some of the comments and I'm just like, man, I feel bad for that person. Yeah.
Jennifer: 17:00
Yeah. If you're in a bad mood and you just want to feel good about yourself, go in that group. So anyway, look in there. All right. So now you're going to instigate a chat with them. First of all, you're going to want to see how their English is. And if you expect a barrier, then that's fine. But if you don't expect, an English barrier, then, just be aware of that. And we talked about the word kindly. I've got some notes here. So we talked about the word kindly. That is just not an English slang term that we use. Pay attention to that. And then ask them a dumb question. Silkies are supposed to have five toes. So ask them, hey do they have all three of their toes? And see what they say. If they say, Oh, yeah. Yeah. Do you only want the ones with three toes? Then you know, you've got a scammer
Carey: 17:53
and like I want to say this We're not saying that you have to be an English speaker to be a breeder but what we are saying is if you've been in America and you're selling birds you will know the language, you will know how, what we think and how we talk. And when she's talking about, do a chat, if you're not a hundred percent sure, or if you're wondering, ask them if they would do a video chat and show you the birds. That's going to let you see birds. That's going to let you hear birds. And it's going to let you know the condition that they raise their birds in. You can use those decisions to, you, you may have a great. And everything else may say it, but when you video chat, you look and see that their birds may have coccidia because the chicks are in five inches worth of poop because they don't clean anything out and you don't want to subject your farm to that. Don't get them. And if they won't, I would be willing to say that if they won't send you a selfie of them with a bird or a video or video chat with you, and they're asking you for 250 for a dozen eggs, don't do it.
Jennifer: 19:15
No. So yeah, that's a good, that's a good point. The FaceTime now, I personally probably wouldn't do that. I don't sell hatching eggs off of my orphans or coaches though. I sell chicks, but if somebody, if somebody would persist and they wanted to buy birds off of me and I liked them, then I probably would do a video chat.
Carey: 19:37
Yeah, if they said, hey, I've been scammed a few times. Can you do this even just for 30 seconds? When it got convenient, I would entertain it.
Jennifer: 19:48
Yeah, because you have to understand that we're busy. I work Burge probably six hours a day. So if I have to stop and video chat, Yeah, it takes time all that stuff takes time. All right, so stick with the dumb questions, silkies have dark skin black skin stretching my silky knowledge here. Do also keys have black skin? I'm pretty sure they do. So I ask them, do they have yellow skin and see what they say? Yeah. That's what
Carey: 20:16
color their legs are.
Jennifer: 20:18
Yeah. Yeah. But you have to know, don't let them try to trick you and convince you that it's okay that they don't have black skin or yellow skin or whatever it is that they're supposed to have. Let's see. And then if you finally you've decided that yes, is legitimate as you can. Reasonably think that they are and you decide to pay them. Credit card would be the first choice.
20:45
Yes, definitely.
Jennifer: 20:47
Then you can just call, you don't have to deal with them. You just call your credit card and dispute it. If you don't get the product never use your debit card. I don't even have a debit card. Don't even ever use a debit card. Because then you're just asking for trouble. So then you're left with PayPal or Venmo. I don't use cash apps. I'm not familiar with it, but I assume it's about the same pay the 3%. Use the business
Carey: 21:12
stuff. Don't do the friends and family. Cause if you do the friends and family cash out like PayPal, even PayPal and Venmo, if you do friends and family. They're not going to help you if you get scammed, period.
Jennifer: 21:27
Now, if I tell you something is a hundred dollars and you send it to me business. And only send a hundred dollars you have to understand that they docked me the three percent So the trust or the insurance or whatever you want to call it that is on you so you as the buyer need to pay that three percent
Carey: 21:52
And I mean What's what's 3 when we're talking about the possibility of losing a hundred.
Jennifer: 21:57
Exactly. Exactly. And I would highly encourage you to do it, to me, that's just insurance.
Carey: 22:05
Another thing is a lot of them. We're starting to see, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners are too, a lot of posts where it says, this is Facebook and we're admins shutting your page down dah. Click this link to validate it. Don't click that link.
Jennifer: 22:26
No,
Carey: 22:27
because when you click that link, you're going to enter in your username password, and then they have it, which brings up some other suggestions on your, all your social media, you should have minimum 12 characters in your password and you should have uppercase letters. Special characters like exclamations, pound signs, dollar signs, something like that. But don't replace S's with dollar signs, the at signed or the one that's above the two. Don't use that to replace A's because a scammer will realize that dollar sign at sign is S C or dollar sign C at sign scam. Don't do that. Don't make your password. And enable the two step verification, even if it's as simple as using, a text message to your cell phone, or there's companies out there that have physical keys that you can stick into your USB port and tap it with your fingers, you use stuff to protect yourself when doing anything online. And like she was talking earlier with a credit card, A lot of people, especially farmers, don't like to use credit cards. We like to pay cash, but here's the fact of the matter. If you using a credit card company's money and that money gets tied up from a scam, they're going to do what they can to get their money back as quick as possible. If it's your money that came off of your debit card, your bank is going to tell you we have 10 days to figure this out. Meanwhile, you may get your money back in 10 days, most of us work hard for our money. And if we lose a hundred bucks, we want to find it quickly, not 10 to 14 business days. So use the credit card for that. It'll protect you. That's why I use one when I'm traveling on the road, I pay it off at the end of the month, but. If somebody snags on credit card information when I'm paying at the pump. They're going to fight for it quick because they want their money back.
Jennifer: 24:44
Okay, my scam story was a year and a half ago, so it was at Christmas time of 2022. Yes, the week of Christmas 2022, and my page was hacked, and I couldn't get in. I couldn't get it back. Now, you have to understand that my page is monetized. The scammers are after the monetized pages. So what they do is they go in there, they take them over and they change it to their bank account information and then they get the deposits for it. So I contacted Facebook the best I can because nobody actually works at Facebook and was of no help. I did everything that it told me to do, worked with it for about, I don't know, four or five days I worked on it, could not get my page back. I was so mad. And finally one of my kids said, hey, I've got a friend who could probably take care of this for you. And so I contacted him. And he tried to do it correctly, like Facebook wants you to, and he was not successful. He ended up having to hack my page back. And they were, I guess the scammers were really mad because like for a week after that, all I did was get emails from Facebook going, somebody's trying to attempt to get into your page. Cause I, by then I had turned on. Two factor authentication changed my passwords. He had locked up my page pretty good for me. And he said, nobody should be able to bother it again. So make sure that you have that on. And if you lose your page, you. It's near impossible to get it back. So I guess at this point now what we're talking about is the scammers coming after the monetized pages, not just trying to scam a hatching egg buyers or chicken buyers out of their money. So you have to watch them coming after your page. So is there anything else you want to add before I talk about this really elaborate scam that got ahold of me last week?
Carey: 26:51
No. Talk about that and we'll close out.
Jennifer: 26:54
Okay. So there's a lady in Florida, she's a breeder and she had a really large following and over 10, 000 followers. And about maybe two months ago, her page was hacked. She was unable to get it back. So I talked to her about that and then forgot all about it. Last week the same thing happened to me. I got the Notification. Hey, we want to place ads on your page Would you be interested in that? We'll pay you up to 600 per ad. Come on Who doesn't want to do that? So I But at the same time I had her words in the back of my head, be careful. So I went through the whole thing and just so you know, you're there, I guess they're bots. I'm not really sure if they're real people or not. But the name of the website is monetizer. com and it's spelled funny. M O N E T I S O R. And they'll tell you, Hey, we're going to pay you for these ads. We'll send you three ads to place on your page. You choose which one it is. And then we will pay you. Pay you either by bank draft or PayPal or Venmo. It's super easy and everybody's doing it. That's that's an issue right there. So anyway, I looked at the website. And it is a legitimate website. It looks good and it's owned by another large company that is a website host provider out of, I think it was Delaware. So I went a step further and I said, okay, you, send me some sample Facebook pages with your ads on them. And so I looked at those and they did, they looked real. Cool. Then I said, okay, I've seen them go ahead and send me the information. And she says we have to have your email address. And I said, why just send it to me on the chat? And she said, no, we're not able to send it on the chat. It has to be through email. Now, what do you have to send that can't be sent on a chat versus email? I was like, okay, the whole time now I'm screenshotting this. To the breeder in Florida, and she's yep, looks the same. Yep, looks the same and we're talking about it and so I made up an alias, which is really easy to do an email alias and Made one up to it to him and within seconds I had an email invite to be an admin on their META Business page. Now I screenshotted that to her and she said, yep, that's exactly it. Don't click on it. So what happens is this is the scam. So Carey and I are co admins on our business pages. Now, if I get mad at him, I can go in there and delete his privileges. And keep myself as admin on all of the pages, basically. I essentially lock him out of his pages, but he put me as admin on them. In the meta Facebook, what is that app? The business app. The business app, okay.
Carey: 30:32
Meta business, whatever it is. Yes. Meta Business Suite.
Jennifer: 30:36
So I could very simply lock him out of it. I could do it right now while we're talking. Now what this link was that they sent me was an invitation to be an admin on their business page. So as soon as I did that, then they would have deleted me as admin, which would have wiped out all of my pages would have wiped out all of Carey's pages and really put the hurting on both of us. So I immediately texted Carey when all of this happened and I said make sure you don't click on any of this crap, but That is the scam. So the breeder in Florida Her original page She was never able to get it back. Facebook is no help to you to do these things So she had to create a new Facebook page for her stuff And They are still making posts on the original page with these ads. And so those links that they sent me for the Facebook pages with ads on them, that's what those were. Those were pages they had taken over and had placed the ads on in order to entice more people like me to click on them and lose my pages. Because I think I have four pages now and admin of several groups and stuff and so I would have lost all of that.
Carey: 32:09
I mean it, it gets deep. It gets real deep.
32:13
Yes.
Carey: 32:13
When when you messaged me and said, do you have two factor on? I'm I laughed and I said yes. But then the curiosity made me like, what the heck, where did that question come from? And then he started telling me about the, what all was going on. And I was like, man, they're. These folks are getting real creative if they put that creativity towards the job. They might actually make some serious coin
Jennifer: 32:39
So I have to tell you even as of this morning I got yet another email because what they're doing is they are making themselves look legitimate By using Trustpilot. So if you go on Trustpilot and look up monetizer, don't forget it's the SOR. They have I'm looking at it right now, seven total reviews. None of them are names that I can pronounce. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying that those are not American names at all. I'm I don't know. But anyway the reviews are obviously made up because the way that they're typed. One of them even uses the word kindly. But then I went in there and I said, scammer alert. This is this page is a scam, and they will attempt to take over your made a business page, and they actually challenged it. And made Trustpilot email me for more information. And I gave the more information, which irritated them further. And this was their answer, which is now posted on Trustpilot. So you can go in there and look at it. And it says, we regret the issues. Kindly contact us on our site and we will try to resolve your problem because, which is not even spelled right, you have not provided correct information when I applied request details from you here, so it doesn't even make any sense what they're saying. But they're trying to get that review taken down is what they're trying to do.
34:23
The
Jennifer: 34:23
other thing is they told me that they had been around for several years. Now you can go to domain age checker. This is another tool that you can easily use to see if somebody is somewhat legitimate and they just made this website in January. So it's not even an old website.
Carey: 34:45
Yeah. You can look up who owns domains and see where they are as well.
Jennifer: 34:53
Yeah. None of this stuff is hard. You just Google it and this stuff just comes up. So for people trying to get started in chickens, you got to watch through the scammers and once you're Even once you're more, I don't know, savvy, and you've got monetized pages and stuff, you've got to watch for the scammers.
Carey: 35:14
Yeah, once your page starts getting to a level where you are monetized, they're gonna really start coming after you.
Jennifer: 35:21
Oh, yeah, me and you get texts or messages, daily. Easily daily, if not several times a day trying to tell us that our page is going to be deleted or we need to click on this link to verify our Facebook information or whatever. Just delete all of that stuff. That is not Facebook.
Carey: 35:45
All right. It was good talking.
Jennifer: 35:48
Yeah. Is there
Carey: 35:49
anything else you got to share about your experiences?
Jennifer: 35:53
I would just like to say that just don't think everybody's a scammer. Because me and you sell on Facebook, and we're not scammers. And there's a lot of great people on there. Just do your homework and don't just make blanket statements like everybody on Facebook is a scammer. Because I would say it's only 50 50.
Carey: 36:13
And I'll say this too, if you are working with somebody and they, if you don't have proof that they're a scammer, don't just start telling everybody that they're a scammer,
36:27
because sometimes
Carey: 36:28
when you ask a million questions and they have five other customers or potential customers asking 10 million questions, it's going to take time to get back. And that's legit too. But by all means, once you find out that they're a scammer, expose them. Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive all the new episodes right when they are released, and they are released on Thursday mornings. Feel free to email us at PoultryNerds@gmail.Com and let us know what you think of the show. If you're on Facebook, check us out at the Poultry Nerds and make sure to give us a like and a follow. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning and keep it egg citing. This is Carey from Poultry Nerds signing off. Feathers up, everyone.
