There has been a vast outpouring of support from across the world for the victims of the Tumbler Ridge shooting.
As of this writing, the Tumbler Ridge Parent Advisory Council’s fundraiser alone was nearly to three quarters of a million dollars.
With so many people willing to donate so much, it’s no surprise that people have been setting up fake fundraisers.
Indeed, as far back as February 11, there were questionable fundraisers being set up. And so a concerned citizen out of Chetwynd—who contacted me asking to remain anonymous—started to looking into the issue.
“A friend mentioned to me there were rumors of fake fundraisers,” she tells me over email. “I began searching Google for them that day. The first one I investigated caught my attention because it was written by ChatGPT, the organizer didn’t identify how they were connected to the community, and I didn’t recognize the logo overlaying the image of the TR school.:
Turns out the logo was for the Australian Broadcast Corporation. The image, it appeared, had been taken from a broadcast from ABC News.
This, she says, gave her an idea. The number of fake fundraisers that she could see was fairly low, but she knew that it was possible for people to Geo-fence their fundraisers, meaning they could say “only show this to people in this country or region.:
But two can play that game. She changed her IP address to make it look like she was from Australia. “I found three more that way.”
And even more are popping up. She says just today (Feb 19) she did another search with an Australian IP address and found a GiveSendGo link for the victims of Tumbler Ridge. “There are others.”
And while GoFundMe has a guarantee in place that says “if you get scammed, we will cover the cost”, that’s not the case for all the organizations that work in this space.
For instance, she says that she’s found a number of campaigns on GiveSendGo that are accessible from outside Canada.
There have been a number of fraudulent fundraisers that have been shut down on the gofundraiser.org site already, and, as of Saturday, the site appeared to be down, though whether temporarily or for good is unknown.
Says our good Samaritan: “There are many more fundraisers on GoFundMe created by folks not connected to the community. From a woman who is seeking funds to support her drive to Tumbler to do “the lord’s work” to highly suspicious ones with images from India and everything in between. Some might be made with good intentions. Unfortunately, good intentions don’t always make good fundraisers. And honestly, there is zero accountability – Tumbler is none the wiser to these campaigns and wouldn’t know if funds were never received.”
Fortunately, most of the scam and questionable fundraisers have either been shut down or have zero donations. As always, we recommend going to the Johnny Malcolm Foundation—www.johnnymalcolm.com—for a list of valid fundraisers.
UPDATE: A note from Justus Irving, one of the people whose fundraisers was mentioned in the “folks not connected to the community” section, but who is a former member of the community:
“I’m writing to acknowledge a post made on the Tumbler Ridge News Page, about the go fund me page made under the name Justus Irving.
“As a member of the community, I am deeply apologetic towards this incident. My intentions were in response to a crisis I had not fully been made aware details of.
“There is no excuse; in the heat of the moment, an account was made and posted on my behalf. The write-up is an emotionally driven letter, at the hands of my own intent, to bring funding and attention to my community without realizing the extent of support that had been already gathered.
“My mission was not to collect funds for myself, but in response to the generosity of the people in the lower mainland and Van. Island, reaching out to understand how they could support. Without the families pages linked to my own, and my neglect to find the original page and correct/eliminate, it is with overwhelming regret that I caused harm and confusion to anyone, let alone the people I care most for.
“Shortly after posting I attempted to retract the page, but it was no longer visible and I had assumed deleted due to its suspicious nature.
“I have no ties to charity fund, there was no money collected from this account and I have no access to this page.
“We are all grieving in our own ways, some of us more irrational then others. My actions have resulted in harm rather then love, and for this I am sorry. I was raised here, went to school, worked almost every job in town and taught for the school district myself. There is nothing I would want more then to take this pain away, to help families, supports, small businesses and mental health care in our region. To cultivate a positive environment for our families and children to find their sense of safety again.
“I’m thankful to be from a place that people are actively working to ensure things like this don’t slide by, and take advantage of opportunities. To be fully transparent, it was written on the floor of an airport through unstoppable tears, worded poorly and without clear direction. I give full permission to share this with whoever was concerned about it, taking responsibility is important especially now. I am comfortable living with this mistake, it’s not the biggest problem at hand, but I am thankful for the opportunity to correct myself.
“I hope you can accept my apology and understand where my heart was at the time.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
