FRAUDSTERS USED MY PET TO CON ME

When her cat went missing, Lisa Fernandes, 38, was distraught – and became a prime target

- FRANCESCA WOODSTOCK, TRACY GAYTON

Sticking another Missing poster to a lamp post, I looked at the photo and gazed into my cat’s big, green eyes. ‘Where are you?’ I asked, fighting back tears. It was July 2021 and I’d rescued Hazel, a long-haired tabby cat, two years earlier from the Blue Cross animal charity.

Then two years old, she’d already been through so much. She was born with deformed joints in her front legs, causing painful arthritis. She couldn’t jump or climb, but none of that mattered to me. I was totally taken by her ginger nose and her adorable 10-month-old kitten Simba.

‘Let’s adopt them both,’ I’d said to my partner Brett, then 47, and when we’d taken them home to our house in Canterbury, Kent, they had settled in straight away.

Hazel didn’t like being picked up, but she loved snuggling on the sofa and being stroked. She was wary around strangers, and while Simba liked exploring, Hazel never strayed far from the garden.

They were our fur babies, and Brett and I doted on them, along with our rescue chickens Capone, Florence and McNugget.

So when Brett texted me in July 2021 to say he couldn’t find Hazel anywhere, I was worried. I’d been away for the night, visiting a relative, and Hazel hadn’t come in from the garden before Brett went to bed. ‘She didn’t turn up for breakfast this morning,’ he wrote.

Something was wrong - she never missed a meal. Thoughts flashed through my mind of her trapped inside a garden shed, all alone in the dark. Or worse, lying motionless by the side of the road.