Northumberland dog owner receives abuse and prank calls

Nick Keeley and his wife Gill, from Tynemouth, have been looking for Flossie since September last year.

Since then, Nick has seen many of his missing posters ripped down, torn up and even burnt in a six-month ordeal of hoax callers.

Nick Keeley and his dog Flossie

Late last month The Northern Echo reported that a Thirsk dog owner was also receiving prank calls and having posters ripped down and posted back through his letterbox.

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However, the couple were able to confront one of the culprits responsible for pulling down the posters, who was a litter picker.

Mr Keeley said he had a “good conversation” with the man who was ripping down the posters in the New Hartley area of Northumbria.

He said: “We realised that there were certain areas of a particular part of Northumberland where we were putting posters up or volunteers were putting posters up and we realised they were coming down within a day or two days.

One of the posters that has been burnt

“The first thing we did was put a wildlife camera up looking at a poster on a tree, and we caught him on camera.

“Once we got a sense of who it was we hung around and saw him do it to one of our posters, we were going to confront him but we just lost him.”

After this the couple issued a picture of the culprit on Facebook with his face blurred out, this gave the couple information on where he lived, after which they posted a letter through his door asking him to ring them.

Mr Keeley added: “He rang me up and we had a good conversation where he basically said that he was a litter picker and that’s why he was doing it, and I explained to him why we wanted Flossie’s face to be so prominent in the area.

One of the posters which has been torn

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“And respect to the man, at that point he was fine and he put his hand on his heart and said he wouldn’t do it again, so it was good.

“We couldn’t understand how our posters were coming down so quickly, so we put our posters up and then some false posters up of some events, and he didn’t take those down.

“So this set off in our minds, this man must know something about flossy that he is trying to hide, and I asked him this.

“He told me the other posters had not expired and the dates were still valid so he was waiting until those dates had gone, so we were adding two and two together and getting five.

“But this took so much of our time, so much of distraction for us to get it sorted and since then, that particular part of Northumberland, he has left them alone like he said he would.”

However, the couple were also having issues with posters being ripped down in Blyth as well as receiving over 100 hoax and malicious calls.

Many of these calls have tried to extort money from the couple as well as just being, according to Mr Keeley, “just nasty.”

He added: “There are other posters going missing in other places, and quite regularly with people tearing them down and ripping out the phone number, ripping out the picture as well.

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“We’ve had a whole range of hoax calls and this has been from very early on, as soon as we started to put out posters and get the Facebook site up and running.

Gill Keeley with Flossie

“Since she went missing, we’ve had 100 plus calls. The malicious ones, they’re just nasty, they come at any time of the day  and any time of the night.

“They say something like ‘have you lost your dog’ and I’ll say ‘yeah I have’ and they’ll say ‘I know where it is’ and I’ll ask where is it and they say ‘it’s hanging from a bridge in such a such place.’

“That type of thing, as well as ‘have you lost your dog? Well she’s dead’ that kind of thing as well.

“We’ve had ones saying we have your dog at such and such address if you meet us there, we go to the address knock on the door and no one knows about it at all.

“There’s also extortionate calls of people saying, ‘we have your dog if you want her back you’re going to have to give us this amount of money up front.’”

Flossie

However, although they have received many malicious calls and abuse, Mr Keeley said they had received a lot great support from the community saying it had been “a real eye-opener.”

Mr Keeley added: “We’ve had mostly amazing and fantastic support, it’s been a total eye-opener to us, there’s more than 6,000 people following Flossie’s Facebook page and hundreds of those are active purely by sharing the information.

“There’s so many people putting up posters and doing whatever they can and it’s been absolutely wonderful the support we’ve had.

Gill and Nick Keeley

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“These are people we’ve never even met, never spoken to, they’ve never seen Flossie and the community has been absolutely fantastic, it really has.”

Mr Keeley contacted Northumbria Police about the hoax calls, however, he was told police would not get involved as the incident did not constitute criminal activity, however, he was given advice by officers.

A spokesperson for Northumbria Police said: "On December 31, police received a report of malicious communications.

"It was reported that a 68-year-old man had been contacted by someone he did not know, who made comments about his missing dog, causing him distress.

"The man was spoken to and offered advice by officers."

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