The list in the original post is right. What I would add is the pattern underneath all of them, because once you see it you stop needing the list.
Every one of these scams needs you to skip a step, and needs you to hurry.
The urgency is always manufactured: someone else is coming at six, I am leaving for Dubai tomorrow, this is the last one of the litter, the price goes up after Eid. A real seller with a healthy animal is not in a hurry, because they have something people want.
So the single rule that catches nearly everything: anything that makes it hard to see the animal, in person, at the seller's home, in daylight, before money moves, is the scam. Every excuse for why that cannot happen is the same excuse.
What I actually do now:
Video call before travelling. Not a video they send — a live call, and ask them to do something specific: pick the kitten up, show me its belly, walk to the window. A recorded video or a stolen one cannot do that. Anyone who will not do a live call is telling you something.
Go to their home. Not a café, not a petrol pump, not "my friend's shop". Where the animal has been living. Half of what you learn is about the conditions, not the animal.
Take somebody. Partly for safety, mostly because you will fall in love with the animal in ninety seconds and stop thinking, and the other person will not.
Daylight. Discharge, skin, and how an animal actually moves are all invisible under a tube light at 9pm.
Pay on collection, in person. No advance, no "booking amount", no delivery-by-bus. If they are genuinely in another city, the answer is that you travel or you do not buy.
Agree the vet-check terms out loud before you pay. "I am taking it to a vet tomorrow. If it has something serious, what happens?" Watch the face. That single question has ended two purchases for me.
And the one that is not really a scam but costs more people more money: the sick animal sold cheap and fast with a sad story. It is not always a lie. But you are then paying 40,000 in vet bills for a 15,000 animal, and you need to decide knowingly that you are rescuing rather than buying — because half of those animals do not make it, and people are not prepared for that.
