Yes believe it or not our Cane Corso Blue has had her identity stolen, well sort of . . let me explain :
A Cane Corso forum I’m a member of has a section on dogs for sale which details any adverts on the net that are spotted by forum members for any Cane Corso or Cane Corso X ? for sale, anyway while browsing this section of the forum I came across an advert for 6 Blue Cane Corso puppies for sale, 2 x dog and 4 x bitch, alongside this advert were some pictures of Cane Corso, 2 fully grown and 1 puppy, now you would assume these were the one of the 6 puppies and the dog and bitch they were bred from. nothing wrong with that you’d assume, but that’s where the problem was, it seems that the mother of these puppies in the photograph looked awfully familiar and the guy in the hat whose should the mother had her head rested on looked even more familiar.
Here let me show you a screen shoot of the advert in question
Who is that good looking fellow with the good looking Cane Corso
Now take a look at this photo from a set on my Flickr page of our Cane Corso Blue
Me and Blue in the car
Notice anything familiar about the photo in the advert and the photo from my flickr set . . .
Yes they are indeed the same photo and considering Blue’s not had any puppies and I aren’t selling any Cane Corso puppies for anyone, it would appear that someone’s stolen Blues identity to try and sell some puppies.
Now as this photo is listed on Flickr as having All rights reserved © i.e. it can not be used without my express permission, it would appear someone stole it from Flickr and used it illegally on the freeadds website.
So I contacted Freeadd explaining all of the above and they have now kindly removed the picture and the advert from there site, they’ve also sent me an email informing me that there moderators will be keeping an eye out for similar adverts, I’ve now emailed them back that I believe the advert to be something similar to the Nigerian Scam emails i.e. they try to sell you something and ask for the money up front, either that or its some other sort of scam.
So as you can see Blue has indeed been the victim of identity theft for profit, so if dogs are’nt safe from it what make you think you are !