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.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
