“About a year ago my son Blake fell ill after numerous doctors and me not backing down he got diagnosed with type 3 vonwillie brand, we thought ok we can know he’s gonna be ok. Wrong the bleeding got worse, he started losing weight and passing out on me, my motherly instinct knew something was wrong. Back to the Drs we go, after 12 tubes of blood and two separate bone marrow test we found out its leukemia,” wrote Victoria Morrison on a GoFundMe page she titled “Blakes Bucket List” (archive here) which she set up on June 21, 2016. In it, you see Morrison and a lightly-bronzed, towheaded boy wistfully gazing into the camera. “Blake made a list of things he wants to do before he gets to sick, now it’s my job to help him do just that,” she said, going on to explain that she’s a single mother of four kids who simply can’t afford to splurge on her dying son.
As it turns out, all of it was a lie. And now, Morrison won’t be a single mother to any of her kids any time soon. A Nevada judge has just sentenced her to five to 12.5 years in prison, the single largest prison sentence I’ve seen in a GoFundMe fraud case to date. It’s worth noting however that the book was thrown at Morrison not for the fact that she scammed people out of money surrounding the boy’s made-up illness and subsequent made-up death but rather for “child neglect or endangerment causing substantial mental harm.”
[for more back story, see: Victoria Morrison in her GoFraudMe debut back in April of 2017]
“What she did to him was deplorable, was evil,” said Carson City Deputy District Attorney Melanie Brantingham. “It’s some of the most depraved conduct that we’ve seen in our community. Not only what she did to the boy, but to the community at large. She perpetrated a fraud on the community and got the community behind her in this.”
Her efforts to scam the community only garnered about $2000 in cash and gift cards according to authorities. How could it possibly have been worth it?