I spent last night just looking at morphs available for sale just to keep myself uptodate with the current trend with ball morph fashions.

Mostly just browsing kingsnake and fauna classifieds. Fauna has a section where buyers report scammers or looking to confirm seller's rep. To my surprise, the amount of scammers out there are amazing. For example sellers that would not honour deals, others just selling normals as hets, asking refund after making false claims the purchased animal is sick or lost, the list goes on. What i also found shocking is that sellers are taking advantage of the ever growing morphs industry by just moving snakes around from one seller to another buyer, without even thinking the health conditions of the animals. Its just pure greed and i know it can be quite financially rewarding but using these animals like casino chips are plainly wrong and unethical.

The het scam

One thing i observed is that scammer who are selling normal as hets most certainly tries to attract innocent or gullible customers by sending fake pictures to prove the legitimate parents. Pictures are usually stolen from other websites or from innocent breeders.They would go to the extream making fake inquiries or pretending to be interested buyers and approach sellers/breeders about their snakes and asking for pictures. Now, obviously breeders will not be able to provide pictures asap, so these scammers would try and delay their victims by giving excuses such as broken camera, leaving the state, visiting a dying relative and etc, but eventually they usually send their pictures. Some of this pictures are taken fresh therefore you dont see it on websites and they would use this pictures as proof to their victims.

Anyways, i thought i might start this thread so we all could contribute and share our observations or experiences.