It’s been 20 years since a con artist invented a breed of cat, claimed it was hypoallergenic, and charged unsuspecting customers tens of thousands of dollars only to deliver felines of a different breed.
Yet you wouldn’t know that by all the articles, listicles and social media posts by unscrupulous news brands and pet sites that continue to spread misinformation about the so-called “Ashera cat.”
Because of the overwhelming amount of misinformation about the fabulated breed on the web, even prominent AI models, like those integrated with search engines, tell users the Ashera is legitimate or claim there’s “controversy” about it, as if the question of whether it’s real or not is still up in the air.
The sources of misinformation include a popular YouTube channel that praises the Ashera, calling it “basically a Ferrari with fur.” Cat information sites like Catster and KittyNook describe it as if it’s real, while dozens of pages on Facebook and Instagram claim to sell Ashera cats. Even articles on major platforms like MSN and Yahoo discuss the Ashera as if it’s a legitimate breed.
The ubiquity of “for sale” posts proves that scammers are still benefiting from the confusion created by the media stories repeating long-debunked claims. We last wrote about the Ashera in early 2024, and the situation hasn’t improved. If anything, there are even more bad actors trying to rip people off by promising them genetically engineered miracle cats.
For the sake of being as blunt as possible so there can be no ambiguity:
The Ashera does not exist. It has never existed.
The man who “created” the Ashera, Simon Brodie, is a British national with a long criminal history. He fled and changed his name when his scam was exposed.
Not a single person who paid him received an “Ashera cat.”
Brodie launched his Ashera cat scam in the early 2000s by fooling several major media outlets into positively covering his fake business. He presented himself as a tech CEO and geneticist whose lab created the breed. The Ashera was developed, he claimed, by manipulating the DNA of existing cat breeds, removing the mechanisms that create allergens.
It’s worth noting that even now in 2026, no genetics company has done so, and geneticists still do not understand what function the relevant protein (Fel d 1) plays in feline biology. They know it produces allergens, but that’s a side effect on humans, not its purpose. Using gene-editing technology like CRISPR to snip out the relevant genetic code could have catastrophic consequences for the felines whose DNA is edited.
Yet reporters for major news outlets, including the New York Times, Time magazine, Reuters and National Geographic, didn’t question Brodie’s claims. The positive coverage in national and international publications vaulted Brodie’s scam to new heights, bringing him new customers.
It wasn’t until angry customers went to ABC News that the scam was fully exposed. DNA tests by an independent lab concluded so-called Ashera cats weren’t genetically engineered and didn’t have lower levels of allergens.
Brodie’s claims of an allergen-free cat were especially beguiling to people who’d always wanted a pet cat but found their allergies were too severe.
“I don’t think any cat is worth $4,000,” a customer named Mike Sela told Columbia Journalism review, “but this seemed like a magical opportunity, especially with parents trying to get something for kids. You never thought you could get a cat and this is your chance.”
Brodie was neither a tech CEO nor a geneticist. He had no employees and his lab didn’t exist. He ran his “high tech startup” from his apartment, charging customers up to $100,000 for Ashera cats and drop-shipping them Bengal and Savannah cats from breeders.
Despite claims to the contrary by many other breeders, hypoallergenic cats aren’t a thing. All breeds of cat have the Fel d 1 protein, which is found in saliva and skin glands. You can’t buy an “allergy free” cat, and there is no governing body that certifies a cat as allergy free or “less allergenic.”
This isn’t difficult information to dig up. All it requires is basic due diligence and critical thinking.
Yet both are in short supply in a world where people just copy existing news articles, shifting a few words around to fool plagiarism detectors, or tell AI to write the stories for them.
To the owners and editors of sites still treating the Ashera cat and similar scams as real: You are serving the interests of scammers who separate people from their hard-earned money in exchange for hypoallergenic cats that do not exist. You’re doing real harm out of laziness or ambivalence. Please stop.
To people who are considering purchasing an Ashera, please don’t! The lure of a supposedly allergen-free cat is strong, as is the idea of a unique breed that looks like a wildcat.
Unfortunately that’s not what you’ll get in exchange from your money. You’ll get a regular fourth- or fifth-generation Bengal or Savannah that you could have purchased directly from the breeder for a fraction of the price.
Why pay for a cat anyway? There are literally hundreds of thousands of cats out there right now who need homes, and contrary to what breeders claim, those cats aren’t lower quality and don’t have anything wrong with them. In fact, domestic shorthairs are healthier than so-called pedigree cats in every respect and are not predisposed to the diseases and other health problems that plague breeds. They live longer, healthier, happier lives, and they’re just as loving.
Scammers continue posting ads and maintaining fake breeder pages because the scam still works, and the scam still works because supposedly trustworthy pet news sites tell readers the Ashera is real. They need to stop. After 20 years, haven’t enough people been scammed?
