It didn’t take long to sniff this one out. Way to keep on top of things, GoFundMe! You might want to recalibrate your supposed fraud detection tech, seems to be malfunctioning as usual.
Thankfully, no one has donated to this campaign, which has been live since July 2016. Since these things often tend to disappear as soon as they’re called out, here’s an archived copy.
I happened to catch this one posted in a GoFundMe campaign sharing group I’m in (for, you know, research purposes) and everything about it just screamed red flag. I was able to put this together in under 5 minutes.
First red flag: the campaign photo and the profile picture of the Facebook profile sharing it to public GoFundMe groups are the same. Is that really the only photo the campaign organizer has?
Second red flag: the Facebook profile is pretty much brand new
Third red flag: the idiot scammer can’t even get the sex of the child right in the plea
Fourth and the most damning red flag of all: the child in the photo is actually a little girl named Sophie, as revealed by a quick reverse image search.
That thing that GoFundMe says so rarely happens? Oops, look like it happened again! And no one would have even noticed it had I not seen it pop up in a closed GoFundMe campaign sharing group I’m in on Facebook.
One down, how many more to go?
Update: Well that was fast. No sooner did I call the person out than the GoFundMe campaign and the Facebook page associated with it disappeared.
