'Warrior Eli' scam boggles the mind..

Those who know me well will tell you I'm not very often lost for words, but I had one of those moments today when I logged onto the LFCT facebook page this morning. That story I'd seen, the one about little cancer sufferer nicknamed 'Warrior Eli', whose pregnant mom was hit by a truck and died after giving birth to her eleventh child? It was a scam. A beautifully constructed scam, from the point of view of the scammer; nobody even thought twice before sharing the post.

And who would think twice? Most people would at least share the post, some would even go so far as to click through to the facebook page to be confronted by the moving, blow-by-blow account of the tragedy of these people's lives. Reading that brings tears to a person's eyes, makes you want to do something, to help this brave little cancer sufferer to fulfil his mother's last wish; to raise money for childhood cancer. And so, you reach for your credit card. That is how these people raised $1200 through their facebook page in the six hours it was still up after the final virus message about the dead mother broke.

Luckily the deception was noted pretty quickly, and within hours the pages began to come down and the links were broken. The childhood cancer fundraising site http://www.alexslemonade.org/

took the fundraising page down also. It seems that this organisation was duped by Warrior Eli et al just as we all were, after all if someone offers to raise money for your charity, how can you refuse?

The worst thing about predators like these is how they feed on the milk of human kindness. The person holding the credit card is not the one at fault here! The people responsible for this, whoever they may be, have masterminded a way of getting nice people who really love their fellow man to part with some money in the most horrible way possible.

One of the scariest things about this is that, on the internet, not everything is as it seems. It takes nothing to open a few email accounts under different names and create a whole family on facebook if you want to. All the photos were stolen from other websites. Some of the photos were taken from South African blogger Tertia Albertyn's blog,

http://www.tertia.org/so_close/2012/05/someone-is-stealing-pics-of-my-kids-and-using-them-as-their-own-again.html

Another scary thing, which I didn't even think of until I read the comments on Tertia's blog, is the fact that there are people out there who troll the internet and steal photos of other people's children. We forget very easily that the material we post on social networking sites bcomes public property by default; you have absolutely no control over who sees, or uses, your material after you've put it there.

So, what to do? How to protect yourself against people like this? Should we stop wanting to change the world, or harden ourselves against the plight of those who need us? It doesn't seem to make sense to let the scammers win so much from this. Maybe the answer is to not blame yourself for being taken in and to learn from the experience. Be that little bit more mindful that such things exist and a person needs to watch out for them. There are many reasons why it's better to donate to a real, physical Trust like LFCT, not the least of which is that we check that each and every family is who they say they are!

See our website www.littlefighters.org.za for more information on what we do in the 'real' world.