A kitten trafficking case was tried at the Pau court this Thursday. The events took place in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department for a year and nine months, between September 2019 and June 2021. Three men and two women were tried in this case where they admitted having scammed dozens of people to whom they sold kittens at a very high price who were not no race but sold with this ambiguity. The court will deliver its decision on September 5.
Around 200 ads and 300 kittens resold
According to investigators, the estimated gain from this trafficking is €70,000. The modus operandi of this scam was quite simple. Two men took care of recover kittens in neighboring departments but not in the Pyrénées-Atlantiquesfor greater discretion: “We paid between €60 and €80 to donors and we said that it was for our children, our entourage.”
At the same time, two women involved in trafficking were responsible for posting the ads on the leboncoin website, with the words “Selling clean, weaned, dewormed kitten“, at a price between 200€ and 500€. A purebred cat can be worth up to €1,500. The small felines were described as being “Persian type” or “Carthusian” encore “Siamese” while they were crossed. Moreover, they were not neither weaned nor dewormed and less than two months old.
“I fell into a whirlwind”
Buyers have had problems because the cats were not vaccinated. Some kittens have had illnesses or even died prematurely.. No complaints possible, the sellers were unreachable, they used ephemeral telephone chips. “I didn’t want to bother with after-sales service.” reacted the man presented as the mastermind of this stratagem. This Béarnais man has already been convicted for a similar case, his criminal record includes 17 convictions. “You can’t put everything on my client, it’s a basic and stupid process but they weren’t animal torturers.” declared his lawyer Me Maripierre Massou dit Labaquère.
The defendant earned €1,500 per month thanks to this trafficking, undeclared money. He concluded before the Pau judges: “I started with one cat then two, I did it for the money. I fell into a whirlwind. I will not do it again. Firstly because it’s hard to do and then because it’s illegal“The president of the court reminded him”that there are people behind all this“.
The SPA filed a complaint following reports received
The man admitted that he had “copied and pasted SIRET/SIREN numbers“of several companies in its advertisements for the sale of kittens because leboncoin.fr required it. It was thanks to a report from the SPA that the gendarmes became aware of this affair, which is not “not a large scale traffic” stressed Me Maxime Barnaba, lawyer of one of the accused. The lawyer Me Pascal Hippert also pleaded for the acquittal of his client noting: “There is no clear harm, Can we make the link between an ad and a deceased kitten? In this case we do not have the material elements“The prosecution requested sentences ranging from one year in prison to 105 hours of community service.
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