Interesting story. Its easy to spot the real customers from non customers.
Yea, with big things it is easy to spot the scammers. I was never quite sure why anyone would fall for some of this stuff. But I guess they wouldn't keep it up if it wasn't hitting pay dirt somewhere. Sometimes it isn't so easy to spot a scam.
There was another time when we got a call late at night and weren't sure what we were dealing with. The caller was saying that he had a horse down and needed help. We tried to explain that we are not vets and the closest one was over 40 miles away. After a little more talking however, it turned out that he was driving a 8 horse trailer. But he managed to squeeze 9 horses in there. It seems that one of the horses had fallen down. There wasn't enough room to get her back on her feet and she was the one closest to the cab (of course). He was simply looking for a safe place where he could unload all the horses. No one in town would let him unload. So we directed him to our place where we were easily able to unload all of the horses and put them in fenced arenas. Then we were able to get the horse that fell, up on her feet, and reload the other horses.
I case anyone thinks that there was some animal cruelty going on by stuffing 9 horses into a semi trailer, no. This was the biggest and most expensive horse trailer I have ever seen. There were roomy, protected, areas for each horse, lighting, food, cooling/heat, water, and even a closed circuit TV system, for the driver to keep an eye on the horses. The driver had a diesel generator mounted to the back of the cab that provided power for the trailer while he drove.