[Ed. note: This post first appeared on this site on November 1, 2016. It was announced on November 29 that Meg lost her battle with cancer and has died]
What’s strange about the following story is that GoFundMe will leave up a known fraudulent campaign for months (I’m referring, of course, to the infamous Bart the Zombie Cat campaign), and won’t remove a fundraiser in which a supposed animal rescuer straight up lies about having valid 501c3 non-profit status (I’ll tell you that story later y’all), but then suddenly gets diligent when it comes to an actual cancer patient needing help. The mind, it is boggled.
Megan Zipperer, a 25-year-old mother of three in Florida, told local WCJB TV-20 that her diagnosis was brought into question after several unknown people reported it as a scam.
“How could people say that? For them to go report the GoFundMe and say that it’s a fraud and that I’m lying or that my family and all my friends are lying,” Megan told the station.
GoFundMe is known to freeze accounts under investigation, and often requires additional details from campaign owners before releasing funds. It appears that’s exactly what Megan had to do in order to get her campaign back in good standing.
“I messaged my oncologist at 11 o’clock at night and she went and wrote up my report for me to send, to post to all of Facebook so everyone can see the nitty gritty of how I’m dying,” Megan told WCJB.
Meanwhile, pulling up our GoFundMe fraud tracker shows countless cases of cancer fakers. Just a few:
- 29-year-old Santana Banta of Indiana is accused of raising nearly $3000 on GoFundMe for fake terminal cancer
- 25-year-old Sara Nicole Kaufman of Utah was sentenced to community service with a cancer charity after she raised a little over $550 pretending to have cancer herself
- 41-year-old Joyell J.D Riley of Ohio claimed to be a decorated Marine veteran needing money for breast cancer treatments; she was neither a Marine nor did she have breast cancer
- 32-year-old Jessica Good of Oklahoma admitted she fabricated claims that her daughter was terminally ill with cancer
Mind you, those are just a few of the many cases we’ve written about here since the site was founded in April. Yes, April of this year. So… counts on fingers… in the last 8 months.
Yet here you have people like Megan, people who are genuinely suffering, getting the third degree all because a few assholes (see above re: previous cases of fake cancer) have ruined it for everyone else.
Sadly, this is how it has to be. Hope you’re proud of yourselves, cancer fakers. It’s because of all those unscrupulous dickwads that people like Megan are forced to take precious time they don’t even have to prove they are legit.
Megan’s GoFundMe campaign has raised over $65k so far. A note on the campaign states in all caps that money raised will be used by the Zipperer family for any purpose they see fit as Megan, her husband, and their three children spend what time they have left together as a family.
A YouCaring campaign for Megan started by someone of unknown relation to the family has raised an additional $10k.
