Insurance Company Facilitates Dog Dealers

Britain’s largest pet insurance company, PetPlan, has been awarding dog dealers the status of ‘trusted breeders’ without performing so much as a basic check. The predictable result is puppies born into squalid conditions and riddled with disease.

And the whole things is fueled by kickbacks: Every time a new puppy customer takes out a Petplan insurance policy, the breeders who is signed up to the "trusted breeder" scheme receives a "commission’ in the form of shopping vouchers.

Petplan makes no checks when accepting a new breeder on to its register; it's simply a pay-to-play dog dealing scheme with absolutely no oversight, inspection, or safeguards.

Being registered as a "trusted breeder" (i.e. paying a small sum and having your check clear the bank) allows puppy farmers to list and advertise their dogs on Petplan’s "Find A Pet: website.

The Petplan scheme has been used by criminal dealers who buy in puppies but pose as breeders.

A gang of six dealers from Greater Manchester, led by former escort Grace Banks, imported hundreds of dogs from puppy farms in Ireland then pretended they had been born at home to family pets.\

She and her brother Julian King raked in about £8,000 a week between them by selling puppies in poor health to unwitting animal lovers. When arrested, Banks, 29, was found to have dead puppies in the boot of her Mercedes. The gang were registered with Petplan and offered the insurance cover with their dogs, some of which had just days to live....

...The gang were selling puppies of various breeds, including chihuahuas, pomeranians, spaniels, shih tzus and Yorkshire terriers, for between £550 and £650 each. Yet 65 per cent were later found by their heartbroken new owners to have had life-threatening, congenital defects.