Fraudsters 'outed'

Those who take your money and run...

Would you immediately order one of the above piglets if you saw these photos in an online ad'?

Well I know know of 4 people who did, and none of them got a piglet.They paid R1500 for a piglet and R700 for the flight. They were then contacted by a fancy pet travel agent who wanted R3500 for security for a special electronic crate, most of which would be refunded when they got their crate back! One lady paid this, and was then asked for a further R3500 for insurance for the piglet!  If you don't want to be conned then:-

ASK FOR PHOTOS OF THE SAME PIGLETS HELD BY THE SELLER.

ASK FOR PHOTOS OF THE PARENTS (WHO SHOULD LOOK LIKE ADULTS)

SPEAK TO THE SELLER ON THE PHONE AND ASK QUESTIONS. 

SPEAK TO THEIR VET AND PREVIOUS CUSTOMERS.

For nearly 20 years I've witnessed fraudsters conning people to part with their money and get nothing in return, or selling pigs that grow massively bigger than their 'guarantees'.

I'm now going to 'out' the people who I know of as dishonest or downright criminal. I will just give the facts at my disposal, and not hearsay. If you have been the victim of fraudsters, please contact me to add your complaint, as well as some sort of proof of it. (Preferably a criminal case number if you have opened a case with the police.) If you have no proof, then contact me and I'll just keep record of it - it might add up to something if many people have the same complaint against the same person.

For advice about what you can do if you have been a victim of fraud, see my article 'The crockery crooks' on the article page.

Dishonest: Tall tales about small pigs!

Pumpkin and I share a joke about the size the crockery crooks say theirs are! 16cm high! Jack Russel size! Hawhawhaw!

                                      1) SA: Apex Pigs / Apex Miniatures SA / TheBarnMelkbos: Steve Watermeyer, Cape Town 

                                     2) SA: Teeny Tiny Pigs: Carmen Vosloo, Cape Town

                                     3) UK: Little Pig Farm: Jane Croft, Cambridgeshire, England

                                     4) UK: Pigs R Us: Rob Rose, England.

  The longer versions...

 1) Apex Pigs (Apex Miniatures SA / TheBarnMelkbos): Steve Watermeyer. Cape Town 

Last year he advertised (4th july 2012) on OLX...

"We have fully grown pigs on the farm, who do not exceed 16cm in height, and have bred smaller in the past. We are the only Breeder who can assure you of a certain size!!!! We give this in writing and we issue Certificates."  

(The 4 exclamation marks are his. In one of Terry Pratchett's discworld novels he comments about the use of extra exclamation marks demonstrating a certain state of mind. I wonder if Steve's subconcious is rebelling against such an outrageous lie!)

I invite all who read this to take a ruler or tape measure and LOOK to see how big 16cm is. I've just done it and measured 3 of my normal house cats, who are all bigger than 24cm. He therefore claims to have fully grown pigs that are way smaller than house cats. (That deserves an exclamation mark but he's put me off of them alltogether.)

He's now proudly referring people to the recent article in the Farmer's weekly (29 June 2012) about his pigs. Unfortunately the magazine did not check his credentials (or research anything about miniature pigs, or anything about breeding practices in general) when writing it, and published a lot of the rubbish that he told them. He claimed that he breeds fully grown pigs that are jack russel size - the smallest one that he's bred having been 25cm high (note the past tense, showing the absence of any fully grown pig of that size now). Where is that pig now? Did it join the other pigs that were fully grown at 16cm and smaller last year, and grow away?) He warns that 'overfeeding' his pigs can make them grow too big! Here are other statements that he made in the Farmer's Weekly:-

"If they’re constantly overfed, they’ll grow larger than anticipated." 

Food cannot make a pig grow bigger than it is genetically programmed to be. Starving an animal will slow (stunt) its growth, so that it takes longer to grow to its full size. This man seems to be following this policy, and the photos of his thin pigs in the magazine add to this impression.

He says he's using a "wide gene pool" to breed with (in other words he's got pigs from lots of different people) and that the "resulting piglets vary greatly in size!"

This is not good news for a buyer, who would like to know what size their piglet is going to get. The only way you can get consistency in the size of babies you breed, is to breed within a narrow gene pool. That is called line-breeding. All breeds of animlas have been produced like this. All dog breeds have been produced like this. You'll get a slight variation in size in Scottish terriers, but all scotties are about the half the size of all border collies. If you put a scotty to a border collie, you're going to get a real mixture. How can you guarantee the size any one of the puppies will be? This explains this man's problem - he's breeding with pigs of different breeds. That's why he says...

"Since teacup pigs are not a formal breed, it is impossible to guarantee that the offspring will be as small as their parents. The stock used to breed these tiny pigs can vary significantly in size..."

Maybe his stock varies significantly, and his resulting 'mongrel' piglets can be even bigger than their parents, but good breeder's don't have that problem.

On his website in October 2013 he seems to have forgotten that teacup pigs are not a breed, and says about himself (my underlining):

"Miniatures, Teacups and other breeds are now his forte, constantly producing fantastic new breeds with characteristic and traits never seen before the in world of Pigs.  A constant and experienced eye is kept on all of the breeds we are producing and in time there will be more to come.  At the moment we have established over 10 new traits within the swine developement arena, and continue to shine with surprises."

"Below are some of the breeds that we deal with mainly - you will notice a breed called Funny Pigs - This is a totally new breed which originated at Apex...

Teacup Pigs... Vietnamese Miniature Pot Bellies... Pot Bellies... Mixed Miniature... Funny Pigs."

 

19/8/2013 update:

His new ad says that he has bred 12 generations already! (Funny he said 6 generations in the farmers weekly. Maybe he quickly bred 6 more generations in 6 weeks!) 

If he wants to claim that he's bred 12 generations in 7 years then he'd have to have mated a female piglet at 12 weeks so that she had piglets at 7 months. A daughter from that litter would have had to be mated at 12 weeks to have had piglets at 7 months, and so on. Multiply that by 12 generations gives you the 7 years that he's supposed to have been breeding. (They are the 7 very fruitful years!) And he said in the Farmer's Weekly that he only breeds a female once she's 18mths old. Come on Steve! Do try to keep up with your own lies. There's someone watching you who can do maths and who can remember what you've said longer than a few weeks! Mind you the ad didn't confirm that he's bred for 7 years. Maybe he's bred for 12 years by now, so that would make it one generation a year. 

18/11/2013 update: 

Steve has been busy with a hate campaign against me: calling me names on the phone; insulting me in daily e-mails; taking this website down over a weekend; and making up stories of whatever he can think up and posting it on a webiste he's started just to slander me with and on Hello Peter, which is a platform that allows slander of any sort against anyone without any moderation. I'm now going to take legal action against him, Hello Peter, and all the crockery crooks who have been getting away with fraud for so long - including the Nigerians.

So far I've been defending myself against attack by Steve and other crooks, and waging a campaign for honest advertising, completely on my own. If anyone reads this page and would like to add their voice of approval in support of my campaign then please do so. Surely there must be people who care that crooks can get away with anything so openly?

2) SA:Teeny Tiny Pigs: Carmen Vosloo in Somerset West, Cape Town.

Carmen tells people that she's the only breeder of 'teacup pigs', while she actually buys and sells other people's pigs, (who don't seem to count as breeders). One can only wonder where she says she bought her first piglets from - no doubt  not from a breeder! She joins the ranks of crockery crooks who lie significantly about the size that their pigs get to. She says that she only got pigs in 2009, and so she has not bred a single pig that has reached its fully grown size yet, but she speaks freely about what size her pigs grow to! 

"Adults typically weigh around 13-29kgs, are fully grown at 2-3 years, and are about the height of a Jack Russel or Cocker Spaniel. Occasionally some of the grown pigs are in the 11 - 15kg range."

(From her website.)

"Some of our smallest pigs are under 30cm and weigh less than 10kg!"

(OLX ad: 21 Oct 2011 - only 2 years after she started 'breeding', when her oldest possible piglets could only be half-grown.)

There are no fully grown pigs the size of cocker spaniels, never mind jack russels. Pigs are not fully grown at 2 years but 4 years old, and a fully grown pig who weighs 10 kg is deadly thin and ill. 

She has only had pigs for about 4 years, and I am not aware that she has kept any pigs for the whole of that time. She sold her first breeding male while he was still very young and immature. If she has kept any of her original pigs, then only the very first pigs would be fully grown by now, and she cannot give any significant statistics about what size her pigs will get. If she hasn't kept any, then it means that she doesn't have a fully grown pig on her property. Having looked at all the photos on her facebook and not having seen a single photo of a remotely adult pig, never mind fully mature, I suspect the latter. 

I've also just watched the Pasella episode that she uses to gain credibility in every advert she places, and in it she tells the presenters that the older piglet is 3 years old, and the younger one 3 months old. It is my expert opinion that the older piglet was nowhere near a year old, and the younger one closer to 3 weeks old, or an underfed 8 weeks old. 

Update: 1/1/2014: someone who claims to have been present when Carmen bought the two piglets featured on Pasella says that I am spot-on with my estimation of their ages. 

3) U.K: Jane Croft: Little pig farm. Cambridgeshire: 

It looks like this woman is Carmen Vosloo's role model. Carmen mentions her in her website. This woman seems to be a glitzy saleswoman. Although she only joined the pet pig business in about 2008, she's been in lots of magazines and newspapers and on T.V shows in different countries! Just like the crockery crooks in South Africa, she uses her PUBLICITY as a credential, rather than building a good reputation for supplying small pigs. 

"I am too well known to rip people off"

she claims, when the british newspaper, the Daily Mail, confronted her about pigs who she'd sold and guaranteed to stay the size of a small tibetan terrier, (maltese poodle - size) and who at only one year of age had both grown to be 2 feet tall (60cm) - well above knee height. They think that the pigs have another year of growth, but unless they differ from pigs in South Africa, they should grow at least another 2 years. Her excuse for the big pigs is that she bought other breeders' piglets and re-sold them. (Doesn't that sound familiar?)

I would like to point out that in true crockery - crook tradition, this woman has jumped onto the crockery pig bandwagon, and guarantees the size of 'her' pigs (did she tell buyers when she sold them piglets from other breeders?) even though she hasn't had them long enough to know how big her first piglets would actually grow to. She makes fraudulant claims about the size that the pigs will grow to, because no fully grown domestic pigs are the size of maltese terriers. She has been forced to repay people the purchase price of the pigs (minus 50 pounds that is the value of a normal pig) through some trade body, but she's darned lucky that she hasn't been taken to court for actual breach of contract and damages caused by very big pigs in houses. She's also lucky that she hasn't ended up in a criminal court for fraud.

Here's the link to the article:

     https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1327917/Call-micropig-Cute-litttle-piglets-turning-oversize-porkers.html

Update: in September 2011 Jane Croft went bankrupt because she had to give so many people's money back.

I wonder whether Carmen knows? She still is buying and selling other people's pigs.

4) U.K: Rob Rose - the man who first used the brand name 'micro pig' - Pigs R Us

was also mentioned in the above newspaper article. His pigs also got 60cm high at one year of age! (Maybe Jane got hers from him! Or maybe they both got them from someone else - or perhaps from the same market!) He's been breeding for 15 years already, so if he's selling piglets that grow that size, he's doing something very wrong - in the intelligence sense, moral sense, and legal sense. I'm speechless that someone can breed that long with fast-breeding animals and not be able to produce a uniformly small pig. Unless he's never had miniature pigs but started with farm pigs. Goodness knows how long it would take to 'selectively breed' a large breed until miniature.

"Has England actually got miniature pigs at all?" I'm beginning to wonder out loud.

5) S.A: Krugersdorp...(to be contniued)