Cat Detective Refuses Service
On September 25th, my partner and I lost our cat, a much beloved year and a half old black cat, River. We have done everything in our power to find him, to the best of our abilities. Signs within 2 days, social media, searching, screaming.
We were informed the "Lost Cat Detective", a pet detective in Dripping Springs, TX, was wonderful and could help us. We are not rich people, and had to wait until Friday to acquire the funds to send her for her services. It is run through PayPal, and looks like this(screenshot):
We sent the money, as instructed by the website. Nothing came up for us to enter information on River or ourselves. Other than an email that was attached, there was no way to deliver information. That was between 11:15 and 11:30 AM on Friday, September 30th.
Curious what to do next, we sent a message through her system.
All we were doing was requesting information on what we needed to do to help find our cat.
Seven hours go by, nothing. I understand that we do not always check our email, etc, so I look around for a number. It wasn't too difficult to find, even if the number that comes up when you google the business leads to a voice mail that sounds garbled, and seems to be from New York. Her actual website has the number, with these two messages:
I called at 7:09 PM on September 30th.
I left a message describing our issue, and that we wished to be contacted. Again, I simply stated that we had paid for service, and wanted to ask what we should do next. I was not expecting her to stop everything, but to help me know what to do. I left my personal email and number.
The day ended, nothing came in by 10pm. I waited till the next day at 1:07PM to call again.
These are the only two calls I made, other than the initial to what I assume is a wrong number, before she finally called me on Sunday, at 11:53AM.
When she calls, she asks where our payment is, saying she sees none from me. I say I understand, and that it should be under my partners name, which is changed from birth (to clarify, I was looking at the paypal, where it says payment is complete). I give that name. She says she sees nothing, but she'll call back after lunch. I never receive another phone call. She finally emails my partner though, stating similar things. My partner explains name change, and all pertinent info. Finally we're told we need to send a cat profile. We are not informed what that is, or how exactly she wants us to send it, so my partner sent her a description of the cat and situation, plus a picture. Again, we are panicking. Our baby is missing.
A few hours later, crying and panicking, my Partner calls Kim Freeman again, trying to understand what is going on. While I could not hear both sides entirely, my partner did not react in any way that a parent missing a child wouldn't. There was no yelling, no cussing, just confusion and frustration. Kim would go on to tell us she was unwilling to help, with no further explanation. She did depart with the helpful advice "I hope you do your due diligence, and search around your neighbors houses and not just give up".
That was real helpful, and not something we'd already tried at all. I tried calling myself a bit afterwards(4:39pm, judging by my sceenshot) and received a male voice. As I was talking to him, I could hear her in the background. He continued to tell me I should leave a message, and I would be called back later.
We will keep trying, but someone we had put hope in, while we did nothing but give our best to find our baby, has denied services without explanation, and has given a sarcastic response to failure to deliver services her own website promises.
Maybe to her, $500 is throw-away money. To us, that is 15% of our monthly income. I do not believe we were in the wrong to expect what her website assured us was the standard. We only wanted help, help in how to finish the process we started by sending 15% of our monthly income, with no further information provided by site or email. In summation, she is part of the Missing Pet Partnership, which states its values are:
Compassion, Professionalism, and most certainly, Respect, were not provided. We are devastated. All we wanted was help, and information on how to provide all we could to assure our baby's safety and return. None of that was given.
The above was exactly what I posted on facebook, except with all photos aligned where they belong in context. The story continued, if not overly much. She responded somewhat quickly, with these 2 messages, neither actually addressed to me:
Immediately after the second post, she blocked me in all forms she could. The second one is the only time we get any explanation as to why she refused service. As for the rudeness, if I may quote my partners (Zan) account:
“Just to clarify, the rudeness of which Kim speaks occurred when she found an itinerant cat that had lived with me off and on (and who left again as soon as I let her out of the garage after 2 days of food and love (her choice)), asked me many questions to determine if I really knew this cat, offered to meet me to get the cat, then sprang a camera on me and declared she wanted to film the reunion. Not having been warned so that I might dress in a way I would agree to being filmed, I refused. Apparently, that was rude. I was then somewhat displeased to be led way back out the country roads to a stranger's home ("Gonna be raped and murdered, cat's gonna leave anyway...") to retrieve said cat. I guess my caution about that may have come off as rude too.“ So, again, I’m reaching out to the world. This woman held our money for 2 days(it was refunded), gave no responses when her site clearly states quick responses, then refused service. I don’t want anyone else to have to go through this. Also, if you live in Central Texas, and find a young black cat, please message me. This is River: