While GoFundMe has helped countless people out of real jams, the charity crowd funding website also attracts scammers, from the homeless man scam to the mother imprisoned for child abuse after pretending her son had cancer.
Downloading a photo of someone else’s crisis and pretending it’s your own is easy to do but so is spotting these fakes. Download the campaign image or copy paste the link and run a reverse image search. You may find the same image shared on the organizer’s social media pages, but steer clear of any campaigns where the images came from a different person entirely.
Some scammers shoot their own photos, so original images don’t make the campaign a sure thing, but can weed out some of the fakes.
Reading through the comments before backing a crowdfunding campaign is a good idea that applies to identifying scams on platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo too. GoFundMe suggests looking for supportive comments from friends and family of the recipient. Lack of comments may also be a red flag.
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