Fast Facts: $100K Missing Cat Reward

By now, all of metro Detroit has heard about the area house fire that caused four cats, two of them world record holders, to go missing in mid-November. While the cats’ owners, Will and Lauren Powers, fear all four may have died in the fire, one may have been spotted recently, and the family has offered a $100 thousand reward - $25 thousand per cat - for tips leading to the safe recovery of the pets.

For anyone interested in locating these amazing animals who were special ambassadors for the Ferndale Cat Shelter, the nonprofit, no-kill facility the Powers directed any donations meant for them personally to after the fire, here are a few key pieces of information.

1. The $100 thousand reward for the cats would be paid in bitcoin. One bitcoin, an online currency people sometimes “mine” from home computing networks, is worth about $11 thousand.

2. The reward is making headlines all over the world, from Washington DC to Singapore. George Takei even promoted the story to his 10 million Facebook followers.

3. According to Patch’s initial coverage of the story, two of the four missing cats held world records: “Arcturus, the world's tallest cat at 20 inches tall, according to Guinness. The other famous cat in the house was Cygnus, the record-holder for the longest tail, at 17.5 inches.”

4. People across the area are looking for the missing cats, and have reported possibly spotting Arcturus in Farmington. Powers asks people not approach the cats, as this might frighten them into hiding, making it harder to locate them if the did survive the fire. Instead, he asks people who may see the cats to download and use a free app called TILE, that will link to a collar the cat wears and alert Powers of its location. TILE, a bluetooth App, TILE allows users to do things like ring missing cell phones, or indicate the last place a lost object with the physical TILE token (like the ones on the cats’ collars) was spotted.

5. One of the cats may have been spotted about two weeks ago. Will Powers wrote on Facebook that “a beast of a cat” 11was spotted Mile near 11 Mile and Farmington roads on , according to the Detroit FreePress.

File photo of Cygnus by the Associated Press