HOT SPRINGS, Ark. (KTHV) - A scammer picked the wrong people from whom to extort money.
Detectives in Hot Springs are tracking a person who has tried to collect ransom payments from three pet owners who lost their animals.
The scam’s first victims were Nevada and Veronica Litfin, who train horses at Oaklawn. Their cat, Orange Orange, disappeared from the race track in the middle of February. Veronica Litfin made a listing on Arkansas Lost and Found Pet Network.
“All that we were trying to do was to reach out to the surrounding area,” she said, “and go, ‘Hey, we call this area home for four and a half months. Can you guys help us get a family member, that we consider family—he travels everywhere with us—back to us?’”
After five weeks of waiting, she received a text message from a man claiming to have her cat.
“And I started having a phone conversation with someone who I genuinely thought was genuine, and sincere, and honest,” she recalled.
The man claimed his granddaughter found the cat in Hot Springs and brought it to his house in Little Rock. He offered to drive the cat back to Hot Springs, and declined the Litfins’ offer of a reward.
“He didn’t want anything,” Veronica Litfin stated. “All that he asked for was $60 for gas money.”
That seemed like a reasonable request from the hero who said he had Orange Orange. The cat belonged to their four-year-old daughter, who picked it out as a kitten and trained it to be the family’s barn cat.
“And every night, whenever we sit down for dinner, we say Grace. And our little girl,” Veronica Litfin said, “God bless her, every night, ‘God, please bring Orange Orange home.’”
But the Litfins’ relief did not last long. After an empty promise to deliver the cat that night, March 20, Veronica and “Jimmy” traded text messages for two hours the following morning.
“By 10, 10:30, [he] demanded an extra $100 for him, saying that he was worth it,” Litfin stated. “’Come on, lady, don’t do this to your kid. He’s worth it, you know, get him back home to your little girl.’”
She sent him a total of $330 through PayPal before calling the police. She explained that she was desperate to reunite her daughter with her best friend.
“Got, literally, to the point where, it was our wedding anniversary, and I told him, ‘I will give you my wedding rings for the cat,’” Litfin stated. “‘It’s our wedding anniversary today, and I will give you my wedding rings. Just return him.’”
Not only did the scammer target the Litfins, he also tried to extort Corporal Kirk Zaner with the Hot Springs Police Department. His dog also disappeared in February, but thankfully, someone found Leo and brought him home three weeks ago. Sunday, however, the same person sent Zaner a message saying he had Leo.
“I can’t believe somebody would be so low as to exploit someone trying to retrieve a lost pet,” Zaner said.
Zaner recognized the number as being the same one that contacted the Litfins, as well as one other person in Hot Springs.
“And I never responded back to him,” he stated. “I’ll wait and talk to him when we arrest him.”
The Hot Springs Police Department subpoenaed the scammer’s account information from PayPal, which Zaner claimed would make it relatively easy to identify the suspect. If and when “Jimmy” is caught, he will face a charge of computer fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of six years in prison and a $2,500 fine.
The Litfins have started to recover from the shock and embarrassment of the scam. With help from their bank, PayPal agreed to reimburse them the $330 under their fraud protection policy.
Once Veronica calmed herself down enough to realize what happened to her, she became angry with “Jimmy.”
“To be manipulated the way that we were, and lied to, and led on, and extorted, it’s enough to truly upset a person. And you don’t realize how far it actually makes you question humanity, and your faith in there still being good in humanity, until something like this happens.”
She continued to trade messages with him, telling him how despicable he is, while he continued to ask for more money in exchange for Orange Orange. She and her husband quickly realized that the man on the other end of the conversation did not have their beloved cat.
“Whenever you’re in the heat of the moment, you don’t, you’re not logically thinking,” she noted. “But after it’s all said and done, and you go back through all of the messages, you’re like, ‘you’re a liar and a moron.’”
The Litfins waited a couple days before telling their daughter what happened, and that moment changed their attitudes.
“I was astounded that my four-year-old, who loves this kitten more than anything in the world, looked at me, and [replied], ‘Mommy, Orange Orange will be fine,’” Veronica Litfin recalled. “But we don’t deal with evil people, Mommy.’”
She let “Jimmy” know that she had gone to the police, and planned to pursue any applicable charges to stop him from hurting other families as he had theirs.
“This is far from over,” she said. “They just chose the wrong people to start this all with.”