A past
Photos of the same kitten added week by week from two weeks old, each carrying the date it was added.
Buying a kitten
Is this seller real? Ask for the one thing AI cannot fake
Pet-purchase scams take money for animals that do not exist. The photo is no longer evidence. A past is.
£7.2M
Reported losses to pet-purchase scams in the UK.
5×
Rise in reported pet scam cases in a single quarter (Santander UK).
Figures reported by UK banks and press, 2024–2025. They describe a trend, not any individual seller.
Reverse image search stopped working
A scammer used to steal a photo from a real breeder. You could paste it into an image search, find the original and walk away.
Since 2023 the kitten in the ad is generated. The picture exists nowhere else, so the search comes back clean — and a clean search now proves nothing.
What a generated kitten cannot have
One image takes seconds. Eight weeks of the same animal, dated as it went, takes eight weeks.
A body that grows
A weight curve that rises the way a kitten’s does, recorded on many different days.
A coat that changes
Colour and pattern shift as a kitten grows. A description written at week two does not match one written at week eight — a fake has only one.
A seller with a yesterday
An account with earlier litters and a longer record, not one created the week the ad went up.
What to ask the seller
- A photo taken today, with a piece of paper in the frame that has your name on it.
- The weight history: what the kitten weighed at two, four and six weeks.
- A link to a running, dated history of this exact litter — not a folder of pictures.
- A live video call: the kitten moving, in the room the photos were taken in.
Questions buyers ask
- Can a scammer simply fake the dates?
- Not backwards. Entries are stamped when they are made, so a history that starts eight weeks ago had to be started eight weeks ago. A seller who set everything up yesterday has a page that says so.
- The seller sent me lots of photos. Is that not enough?
- No. A generator produces as many pictures of the same face as you ask for. Ask instead for one dated photo per week plus weights — a series that had to be lived through.
- The seller has no Pawcode page. Does that mean it is a scam?
- No. Many honest breeders keep no records at all. It means you have less to look at, so lean harder on a live video call and on a payment method you can reverse.
You breed cats?
Keep the diary, open the litter page and put the link in your ad. A buyer comparing you with a generated listing sees who has eight weeks of dates and who has none.