FRAUDSTERS USED MY PET TO CON ME

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