Cart
0
I got scammed buying cattle online years ago. Mine was back in the Craigslist days. I found cattle for sale online, sent money, and eventually realized the cattle I thought I had bought weren’t coming. Thankfully, I got my money back, but a lot of people don’t. Over the years, I watched the same basic scam happen again and again. It just moved from Craigslist to social media and got a whole lot easier to pull off. Someone steals pictures of real cattle, advertises them at a price that looks like a really good deal, and gets someone excited enough to send money to hold the animal before somebody else buys it. Then the buyer finds out the cow never belonged to the person they sent the money to, and their money is gone.
I started seeing my own cattle pictures used in these scams all the time. I have spent more hours than I can count filing copyright reports trying to get my pictures removed from fake Facebook pages and listings. I started volunteering as a moderator in Facebook groups because I thought if we could keep a closer eye on who was posting, we could at least keep some people from getting scammed. That worked for a while, but then the scammers started making their own groups. They could control the posts, delete warnings, block anyone who called them out, and make the whole thing look legitimate to somebody who didn’t know what they were looking at.
So for a while I joined as many of those groups as I could find and tried to warn people anyway. I commented on scam posts, left reviews, and went through the comments, privately messaging people who were asking about the cattle. Some people were really thankful that I took the time to warn them. Others were suspicious of me and wanted to know why some random woman was messaging them to tell them not to send somebody money. I really couldn’t blame them for that either. The frustrating part was watching some of the same people I had taken the time to warn show up a few days later in the comments of another scam page trying to buy another cow. I could warn somebody, but I couldn’t follow them around Facebook forever.
Back then, the scammers had to work a little harder. They would message legitimate breeders pretending to be interested in cattle and ask all the questions a real buyer would ask. They needed more pictures, registration information, breeding information, health information, and anything else they could pass along to the person they were actually trying to scam. Eventually I realized some of my own cattle inquiries weren’t buyers at all. They were scammers shopping for enough information to sell one of my cows to somebody else.
Once I figured out what they were doing, I decided to have a little fun. Suddenly my cows were getting mammograms and Pap smears along with their parvo shots. I badly Photoshopped extra teats onto udders and occasionally added male parts. I hoped that the scammers would pass it all along without noticing and somewhere on the other end an actual buyer would. If they still sent the money after that, I figured that was on them.
For years, I would report one page and ten more showed up. I would get one of my stolen photos removed, and then it would pop up somewhere else. I joined group after group, trying to warn people. But more fake pages, more stolen photos, and more gullible people showed up daily. I was spending hours trying to stop something that just kept getting bigger.
Then AI changed the game again. Scammers don’t have to know much about cattle anymore to sound like they do. They can answer questions, write listings, and keep a pretty convincing conversation going. They don’t necessarily need to message real breeders to collect all the right answers first. They don’t even have to steal somebody else’s cattle pictures anymore because now the cow in the picture doesn’t necessarily have to exist.
At some point I realized I could keep spending my time filing copyright reports, moderating groups, chasing fake pages and privately messaging strangers, but I was never going to keep up with it. Facebook wasn’t built for buying and selling livestock, and I was trying to police something I had absolutely no control over. I kept thinking there had to be a better way to give real buyers and real breeders a place to find each other, and to give buyers more than a Facebook profile and somebody’s word to go on.
That experience is a big reason verification became important to us with HoofnHorn. Users can go through an identity verification process through Stripe rather than simply telling us who they are. That gives us another layer between creating an account and presenting yourself as a verified person on the marketplace. Verification still doesn’t mean we are guaranteeing someone’s cattle, registration information, claims, or how they will conduct a transaction. No system can completely remove that responsibility from a buyer. But knowing there is an actual person behind an account is a much better starting point than what I had when I spent hours digging through Facebook profiles trying to figure out if somebody was real.
That is one of the problems that helped shape HoofnHorn. It isn’t the only problem I’ve run into buying and selling livestock over the years, and it isn’t the only thing we are trying to make easier. I just finally got tired of trying to solve this one Facebook comment at a time. A lot of what we are building comes from things I've dealt with myself, and I would much rather spend that time building better tools for buyers and breeders than spend another ten years chasing fake cows around Facebook.
