WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 46285376

Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

533 points| 1659447091 | 2 months ago |bbc.com

455 comments

order
[+] Animats|2 months ago|reply
"The campaigns with the biggest apparent international reach were under the name of an organisation called Chance Letikva (Chance for Hope, in English) - registered in Israel and the US."

Chance Letikva is registered with the US IRS as a charity. They've filed a Form 990. Location is Brooklyn, NY. [1] Address is listed. It's a small house. It's also incorporated as CHANCE LETIKVA, INC. in New York State. Address matches. Names of officers not given. There's one name in the IRS filing, listed as the president.

Web site "https://chanceletikva.org" has been "suspended". Domain is still registered, via Namecheap.

Some on the ground digging and subpoenas should reveal who's behind this.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/852...

[+] krebsonsecurity|2 months ago|reply
Sometimes just a little bit DNS research can yield a lot of useful results.

Looking at the passive DNS records for the domain chanceletikva.org shows it references the email address [email protected] email address is tied to multiple website registrations for a person by the name of David Margaliot, and also Shoshana Margaliot.

A search on this name in Domaintools finds the name David Margaliot tied to at least 25 domains, including ezri.org.il, which is a very odd site that features a huge image of a young child who is apparently in the hospital holding a gift wrapped box with a teddy bear. The site asks for donations but has a strange mission statement: Ezri Association promotes life-saving innovation through a surveillance drone project for emergency response teams, the establishment of an international medical knowledge database, along with other technological initiatives".

I'll probably continue the rest of this in a follow-up story.

[+] throwaw12|2 months ago|reply
I have reported these ads to YouTube multiple times, because I tracked down their scam websites, but YouTube didn't delete them anyway.

Common pattern they had was:

- similar or same domains

- same messaging on their website

YouTube could have taken action, but it choose not to

[+] jjcob|2 months ago|reply
I'm still waiting for the tech world to wake up and realise that the online ad machinery and user tracking software that the brightest minds of our generation have been working on are just a way to efficiently connect scammers with their unsuspecting victims.
[+] Andrew_nenakhov|2 months ago|reply
There was a period when I was constantly showered with these ads whenever I visited YouTube. It quickly became clear that it was some kind of scam, but YouTube didn't do anything about it for years.
[+] BoredPositron|2 months ago|reply
Same. Even if they delete one it's usually delayed for 2-3 days. The worst part about scam ads is that they surface a day later from a different account with 0 changes to the ads themselves. You would think Google would fingerprint the assets but in the end they just don't care.
[+] benchly|2 months ago|reply
There's no incentive for them to comply with your request. Like Facebook, scam ads are a revenue stream for Google. The profitability usually offsets any negative PR or fallout that results from these platforms turning a blind eye to the point where their budget accounts for some percentage of scam income, leaving them to pick and choose when to take action while they actively make their platform increasingly hostile to users who want to protect themselves from said ads.
[+] nrhrjrjrjtntbt|2 months ago|reply
Google, the worlds biggest and best coconspiritor.
[+] throwaw12|2 months ago|reply
They also had a pattern of loudly crying kids in the beginning of the video, I thought they were faking, after a month they changed the style of start.
[+] oefrha|2 months ago|reply
Scams are extremely high margin businesses and as such can spend very generously on advertising. Consequently the Googles of our world love them.
[+] yalok|2 months ago|reply
In my experience, anything related to Google Ads - they never reacts to any claims of scam…

Their incentives contradict healthy behavior… :(

[+] ryukoposting|2 months ago|reply
Yep. Lately I've been getting dozens of scam ads for pulse oximeters being sold as Glucose meters, with a big ol' FDA logo plastered over the top of the video. A flagrant violation of regulations around medical device marketing.

Here's Google's response:

  We understand you are concerned about the content in question, but please note that Google's services host third-party content. Google is not a creator or mediator of that content. We encourage you to resolve any disputes directly with the individual who posted the content.
...which is a lie, among other things.
[+] throw310822|2 months ago|reply
What struck me is that when I reported an ad with an Elon Musk deepfake selling some crypto scam, I got an email back from Google saying that after reviewing the video they found nothing wrong. I don't understand how this is not actionable in court- I mean, you did act on a report, you declare you manually reviewed the content and that it's good for you? I don't get it.
[+] eleveriven|2 months ago|reply
What's most depressing is that people like you did the right thing (took the time to investigate and report) and still hit a wall
[+] gampleman|2 months ago|reply
Really makes me think that the justice system should have a wide margin for discretionary sentencing. I get that in some sense fraud is fraud, but there is one thing preying on people's greed, and another preying on compassion, charity and vulnerable children in desperate need. Scams based on greed (or other vices) are in some sense limited crimes, since their success punishes what is low, but scams based on what is best in us are much wider in their social impact, since they also disincentivize what is most noble.
[+] mikerbrt2000|2 months ago|reply
Great journalism. I hope the authorities bring this person to justice and arrest them for fraud.

I saw this ad a few months ago on YouTube and flagged it as a scam when I couldn’t find much information about the company. Never donate money through random sites. If you use platforms like https://www.gofundme.com/, at least you have the option to file a complaint if you find something suspicious.

[+] peanutz454|2 months ago|reply
This is part of the reason that people do not donate.
[+] juliusceasar|2 months ago|reply
He will soon move to Israel and escape his punishment.
[+] uxx|2 months ago|reply
Again some Israeli connection in a scam, search google and browse "fintelegram" you will see the biggest and baddest financial crime actors are all based in israel.
[+] stef25|2 months ago|reply
Surely they'll be using AI to make these videos in the not too distant future.
[+] anArbitraryOne|2 months ago|reply
"They were always looking for beautiful children with white skin." But most of the children in the video appear to be non-white. So they're not even good at anti-affirmative-action?
[+] SilverElfin|2 months ago|reply
Great investigative journalism. And so, so sad that these hopeful parents were scammed. Terrible that someone could do this to a child. The conclusion doesn’t give me hope though. The alleged scam organizations didn’t respond to questions and … that’s it? No one is going to jail?
[+] throwfaraway135|2 months ago|reply
A simple way to solve this would be to have some kind of gov certification process.

Which could also include a QR code going to a gov website with details why this org was given the certification.

This isn't perfect but would certainly lower such incidents.

[+] tchalla|2 months ago|reply
The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.
[+] eleveriven|2 months ago|reply
The fact that families have to crowdfund lifesaving care creates the vulnerability but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it
[+] bko|2 months ago|reply
There's a benefit to having a service tied to the individual receiving the service. For starters it put price pressure and competition on providing the service. When someone else is paying for something you don't have a signal of efficacy, in terms of pricing or quality.

To put another way, if I were facing some terminal illness I would want to have full control of picking the service even if it costs money. Sure, I would want "the best" specific to me and have someone else pick up the tab, but that's a fantasy, because no system or third party has as much skin in the game as me. That's why things like elective surgery are so cheap and competitive.

The problem is why do these treatments cost so much? What prevents competition and innovation. And my argument it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system

[+] dev0p|2 months ago|reply
It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to knowingly and willingly steal money from children that need that money to live.
[+] redleader55|2 months ago|reply
I think it's more complicated than this. People with incurable diseases are desperate and sometimes resort to unproven, dangerous and very expensive treatments. Unfortunately, most people don't have enough money for that, so in order to afford them they try to obtain donations to pursue the treatment they think will save them. Places like Turkey, China, etc are heavens for this kind of medicine.
[+] ivape|2 months ago|reply
Is there even standard practices to audit the effectiveness of charity? No accountability means they will always operate like a black box, and I’ve always thought black boxes create misalignments.

Money goes in, and good feelings come out. It certainly serves a purpose, but not the intended one.

[+] IncreasePosts|2 months ago|reply
Do any real* societies have health care systems where everyone who needs cancer treatment gets the best available?

* by real, I mean large societies that aren't propped up by some bizarre economic quirk...eg maybe the sultan of brunei can personally pay for everyone bruneian citizen to get the best cancer treatment. But that's not a scalable solution

[+] throwaw12|2 months ago|reply
easier said than done.

Parents had enough problems to think about.

In a similar way we can say that every shop in Amazon can create own digital shop themselves, but marketing, sales channels and distribution is not easy to acquire.

[+] micromacrofoot|2 months ago|reply
Right, how much are crowdfunding platforms and payment processors making off of the desperation of people who can't afford medical treatment?
[+] why-o-why|2 months ago|reply
The replies to this comment make me so depressed.
[+] xnx|2 months ago|reply
Politely, no. The root cause is 100% this a-hole scammer and his accomplices.
[+] binary132|2 months ago|reply
thieving and scamming are not caused by the existence of scarcity
[+] contravariant|2 months ago|reply
While that is indeed one of the causes, it does feel a bit like whataboutism to point it out on an article explaining the scam.
[+] Joker_vD|2 months ago|reply
No, the root cause is that cancer exists. Or rather, that humans exist at all.

It's all very well and dandy that you can say "actually, there is a larger structural problem underlying it all" when meeting something bad, but it doesn't make that particular bad disappear.

[+] nickpp|2 months ago|reply
I am curious: how else would you fund them? I sometimes donate & follow such cases and cancer treatments are expensive, especially experimental, custom ones. Worse, the rarer and more aggressive the disease - the more expensive the treatment and the slimmer the actual chances.
[+] huijzer|2 months ago|reply
We have over the years raised billions (maybe trillions) for cancer treatments and we seem to have made negligible progress in actually curing cancer. Will it ever succeed? So maybe there is a root cause for your root cause?
[+] Neil44|2 months ago|reply
The world seems to be full of virtuous sounding organisations who are actually evil.
[+] whatever1|2 months ago|reply
I am not religious. But if there is hell…
[+] WesolyKubeczek|2 months ago|reply
I remember there was a flood of similar campaigns on Facebook a couple years ago. Multiple pages, some posts sponsored, some gaming the algorithm, very similar messaging. All about children suffering from cancer. All leading to scammy-looking domain names, some using IDNs. I had been wondering where the catch was, then got tired and just started reporting and blocking them until they stopped.