Parrot scams are out there in all kinds – and they can be very good and disguised. In fact, Dave almost fell for one himself and because he got so close to being scammed personally, he figured out it was a scam.

Here’s what happened…

When you see a hyacinth macaw (baby) being offered to a good home for just the cost of shipping (few hundred dollars) from another country besides the US and the person claims all papers are “taken care of”… it’s a scam. There are import/export permits and numbers you need to be able to bring an animal on CITES into the USA legally. And there is paperwork you HAVE to do on your end that cannot possibly be taken care of. If the “seller” or “giver” doesn’t have a permit number for you, don’t pay. No permit number? No bird.

In this case, there was no bird.

Not to mention… I don’t know many people who would GIVE away a $8,000 bird.

Lately, scammers have just loved using pictures of me. They are literally EVERYWHERE. I don’t seem to find them myself, but our clients are sending links to us in emails, customers, blog readers like yourselves and more are sending these sites our way. So please, keep sending them to us so we can make sure our photos are taken off these places!

The latest one I received in email today from a client was here. The photos on their site aren’t all ours, but the ones of a blonde girl with rosies and a grey? That’s me and MY BIRDS. The ones of macaws on a play gym? Those are birds we raised and train for clients, photos taken in my house during!

All of our photos are kept on flickr, so if you see them on any other websites other than our blog(s) and birdtricks.com related sites, they are fake. They are not “breeder birds” and the breeders we use don’t advertise on the internet. We will never be promoting the “sale” of our birds to the public. We don’t do it.

And, for those of your that know your birds, some of the scammers have been advertising a “blue and gold” macaw for sale and using photos of my blue throated macaw. Hopefully most everyone can tell the difference and catch on that there really is no bird.

Report any fake websites promoting/using our images to info@birdtricks.com.