Article written by Abigail Buchanan
Originally published by The Telegraph, 08 February 2026

Since 2023, the number of ‘catnappings’ in the UK has shot up. Now, reports have emerged of mass-breeding programmes using abducted moggies

In October 2023, Agata Losa, a psychologist from south-east London, found that her Bengal cat, Betty, had been stolen. She had recently moved to the area when Betty went out into the back garden one day and disappeared.

“In the morning, she still wasn’t there and I started panicking,” says Losa, who, appropriately enough, lives in Catford. “For the three weeks she was missing, I went out looking for her, I put up hundreds of posters, I posted up to 10 times a day on local Facebook groups and the Nextdoor app. Despite doing everything I could, there was nothing.”

A neighbour advised her to keep an eye on Gumtree and other sites where pets are sold, and lo and behold, there was a “badly photoshopped” advert for Betty, with a list price of £900.

Losa is not alone in experiencing a “catnapping” – the data is yet to catch up but, anecdotally, this kind of crime is on the rise, even since the Pet Abduction Act of 2024 made “dognapping” and cat abduction a specific criminal offence. In one recent high-profile case last month, a “cat-burgling” Amazon delivery driver in West Yorkshire was caught taking Nora, a family’s ill cat, on a doorbell camera. Thankfully, Nora was located and handed back.

Yet only the lucky ones see their cats returned. Colin Butcher, founder of the country’s first pet detective agency for tracking lost or stolen pets, says that in the past three to four years, cat theft has overtaken dog theft. Indeed data from Petlog, the Royal Kennel Club’s lost-and-found database, shows that, of the 25,000 pets that were reported missing between January 2023 and June 2024, the vast majority (over 20,000) were cats.

In some cases, police have even suspected the involvement of organised crime gangs. In 2023, a spate of mysterious cat attacks in Kent and across the South East saw more than 50 cats taken and returned with a patch of their fur shaved across their stomach. Thieves had presumably done it to ascertain whether the animals had been neutered, as cats often have a small scar from the procedure. If not, they could have been used to breed kittens. The perpetrator – or perpetrators – were never found.

“I messaged, pretending I was a customer, but from my posts online I think they knew who I was,” continues Losa. “They replied, saying the cat was no longer for sale and they were keeping her.” Losa called the police, who opened a case but then said there was nothing they could do.

However, Losa tracked down an address by looking at the rough GPS location on Gumtree and decided to confront the seller in person. “It was a total coincidence that one of the seller’s neighbours was a policewoman, who took pity and knocked for me,” she says.

The people who had stolen Betty were obviously shaken by a knock from the police, as the cat was thrown over a neighbour’s fence a few days later. It was injured, limping, and had an upset stomach, but thankfully made a swift recovery. “The vet confirmed via microchip that she was mine, and I picked her up later that same day,” Losa says. “I’m so glad – for some time I thought I would never get her back, it was very scary.”

One of the reasons for the increase in catnapping could be the ease with which the animals can be abducted. “It’s quite easy to get away with it because it’s a smaller animal,” says Butcher. “It can be concealed in a duffel bag or in the boot of a car. Cats don’t generally tend to make a fuss when they’re picked up, so it’s very difficult to prove. [Sadly] a lot of cats go missing and are never recovered.”

In Butcher’s experience, cats are most commonly stolen for illegal breeding. “If you want to make money out of breeding cats, you either pay a lot of money or you steal [a cat],” he says. An alarming number of people choose the latter. “We started to see a lot of cats going missing in unusual circumstances and then dealt with a lot of disputes [over] ownership.”

Annabel Berdy, who works as an advocate at the charity Cats Protection, says that while, historically, pedigrees were more likely to be stolen because of their inherent value, thieves are now targeting any and all cats in the hope that the owner is so attached to their pet they will pay a ransom.

Londoner Helen* found herself in exactly this surreal situation when her rescue moggie Basil went missing near her home. Initially, she presumed it had just wandered off, as it often did, and would return in due course. As the days went by, however, she slipped into “panic mode”.

After a week of fruitless searching, she printed missing-cat posters and plastered them around her neighbourhood – offering a £250 reward. “I had a call within less than an hour,” she says. It was an unknown number. On the other end of the line was a woman. “She said, ‘I’ve got your cat – have you got the reward money?’ It was very clear that they’d just taken him for the cash, that he was being held for ransom.

“In some ways, at that point I was elated. I mean, with rescue cats, it’s not about the [value]. But I’d had a week of being on this roller coaster of highs and lows. I just wanted to give them the money, have my cat back and have this whole thing over with.” The woman on the phone insisted that they met at Helen’s home to hand her cat over – she is still not sure how the thief knew where she lived, as she presumed Basil was taken while it was wandering around the local area.

Things moved quickly from there. Her boyfriend advised her to meet the thief in a public place, which the woman on the phone initially agreed to. Then she called back with a man in the background and said “We’re outside your house”. In a panic, Helen drove home, with a neighbour for backup, and found a young couple outside her house waiting to exchange her cat for an envelope of cash.

As Berdy points out: “Moggies don’t have much inherent financial value, but obviously they have huge value in terms of the way that the family feels about them and the bond that they have with their family.” In cases like Helen’s, she says, it is usually an “opportunistic crime”.

Basil was unharmed, but stank of cigarettes, so Helen suspects the couple had kept him in their flat until a reward was posted. “I was worried the same thing would just keep happening,” she says. “It’s not something you want to encourage – paying to get your cat back – in case they do it again.”

Happily, her fears were unfounded, and Basil has roamed the neighbourhood without incident since. She has, however, heard of others who have been affected. “Especially before and after Christmas, I think, when people are maybe a bit short of money. It’s an easy way of getting money [but] you’re playing with people’s emotions… I would have paid a lot more just to get Basil back.”

*Name has been changed.