I've e-mailed several "breeders" the past few days trying to find a Yorkie in my price range. Since most good Yorkie breeders are charging more than my sweetheart will let me spend on a new puppy right now I decided to look on sites/ads I normally would never look at when searching for a pet. What I've found on many of these sites like Yahoo is that out of all the breeders I contacted (which were quite a few) only one was not a scammer. I reported a few that I found on Yahoo, but I don't think Yahoo's even doing anything about it since I never received an e-mail back from them saying they would investigate it or remove the ads from those poster.
Sometimes these "breeders" don't ever mention Africa even though they are from there. I ran into a few of these but after they'd give me their phone numbers I'd do a search on their area code only to find that the phone number links them back to Africa. It really is sad and I feel so bad for those people that fall for it.
However, I've heard that you can use an escrow service such as
www.escrow.com to protect yourself a little better if you absolutely must purchase a puppy online. This will allow your money to go to a secured trust account where they will make sure the money is actually valid (protecting the seller) and then give the seller the ok to ship the puppy. Once the buyer receives the puppy and has it vet checked or when the agreed amount of time to have the puppy vet checked expires the escrow company will pay the seller. The escrow service will charge a percentage, such as 4% of the cost of the puppy, but I think that would be worth it compared to hundreds or thousands that you'd lose to a scammer. It sounds like a win/win situation to me. Has anyone tried this by any chance?