The Biggest Scandals To Hit GoFundMe

Inconvenience is the second biggest enemy of charity, the first being pre-ghost Ebenezer Scrooge. If we think a cause or crisis is worth addressing, the only thing stopping us from chipping in is the hassle involved. Therein lies the beauty of the crowdfunding site GoFundMe. It does for charity what the microwave did for cooking: simplify it. There's no need to volunteer somewhere, no wondering whether the Red Cross will spend your whole donation on overhead costs, and people whose problems you might not otherwise hear about get a global megaphone in the form of a well-known website.

Of course, when you make it easy and appealing for huge groups of people to give strangers money, unsavory characters will slither from their hiding places with manufactured sob stories and outstretched digital hands. Other times, the mere fear of being swindled will lead to distrust and backbiting. These instances of toxic self-interest are relatively rare and the defrauded get refunded, but such controversies nonetheless erode the goodwill fostered by a site devoted to aiding strangers. Here are the biggest scandals to hit GoFundMe. 

In 2013, Joanna Leigh publicly patted herself on the back for unseen acts of heroism after the Boston Marathon bombing. The reason no one saw them is that they never happened. As WTVR explained, Leigh went to a viewing party for the marathon but left before the attack. However, in her version of events, a bomb exploded ten feet away from her and knocked out. When she came to, not even brain damage, hearing loss, and "burning in her eyes" could stop her from helping other injured people. Clearly unconcerned about her own well-being, she didn't bother seeing a doctor for days. Imaginary injuries and nonexistent PTSD would leave her unable to work for least two years.

Posing as someone else, Leigh launched a GoFundMe campaign and netted $9,350. She also received nearly $30,000 through two victims' funds and a student fundraiser. To top it off, she got about $900 worth of free dermatology services, because if you can't have a clear conscience, you should at least have clear skin. Of course, Leigh probably had no conscience. Despite not deserving any money, she complained to NPR that One Fund Boston "only" gave her $8,000. The one thing she didn't bank on was people checking her story. Photographic, video, and eyewitness evidence thoroughly discredited her claims. In court, she confessed and was sentenced to probation and community service.

Fred Barley's story was like a blanket for the human heart. Left homeless after a fight with his mother, Barley (above) embarked on a six-hour, 50-mile bike ride Barnesville, Georgia, and lived in a tent so he could register for college classes. When approached by police, Barley, who's black, became apprehensive because of news stories about altercations between black people and law enforcement. But the officers not only treated him kindly, they paid for him to stay at an inn. When Casey Blaney heard about Barley's story, she felt compelled to help. And what better way than to set up a GoFundMe account and finance his education? People donated $184,000.

If this story sounds too good to be true, it's because you haven't read the rest of it. Per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Barley and Blaney began bickering over who would manage the money. Blaney accused Barley of wanting money "to be handed to him" and started questioning the veracity of his story. Barley argued that Blaney was being a control freak. In reaction to the controversy, GoFundMe froze the account. Meanwhile, rumors circulated that Barley wanted to go to another town. Some Barnesville residents felt betrayed or accused him of outright fraud. Others suggested that Blaney intended to keep the donations herself. She and barley eventually agreed to place the money in a trust, since they clearly didn't trust each other. 

Lots of parents deceive their children, mainly about where babies and Christmas presents come from. But certain lies are typically off limits because they amount to abuse. Among them is telling a healthy child that they're fatally ill. However, some parents have crossed that line to bolster the believability of GoFundMe scams.

In 2017, a Florida couple tricked their 13-year-old son into believing he had terminal brain cancer. The parents claimed medical treatment would render him "a vegetable," according to investigators. For eight months, the boy believed he was dying. He told teachers and others at school and was understandably frightened at times. Someone got suspicious and alerted authorities when the parents started selling T-shirts to raise money. It's unclear how much they earned from GoFundMe, but they made $140 off of nine shirts.

Nevada resident Victoria Morrison took this already unthinkable scheme to an even more disturbing extreme. After discovering her son had a "treatable childhood illness," Morrison grossly exaggerated his condition. She told her son he had leukemia and kept him out of school for months. Eventually, she claimed he died, pretended to mourn him at a phony memorial service and said he was cremated. Morrison was foiled by the absence of a death certificate and the presence of her very-alive son, but not before raising roughly $2,000 on GoFundMe. She was sentenced to 5 to 12.5 years in prison. 

Cleveland radio host J.G. Spooner had treachery running through his veins. However, like many skilled con artists, he hid his dishonesty behind a self-aggrandizing display of fake virtue. In 2015, Spooner volunteered to promote a GoFundMe campaign to cover the medical bills of Allyson Thadeus-Zappe, "a woman he knew since elementary school," per Cleveland.com. Thadeus-Zappe had cystic fibrosis, which ravages sufferers' lungs with relentless infections and increasingly hinders their breathing. Naturally, she and her family welcomed Spooner's help.

Then he pulled the rug from under them. Spooner changed the GoFundMe password and stole over $6,000 from the account. Thadeus-Zappe passed away weeks later, much of which she spent being upset about the stolen funds. When her family confronted Spooner, he pointed the finger at GoFundMe and made a show of threatening to "take legal action." Clearly, this wasn't a sustainable lie. Neither was an unrelated scheme in which Spooner made over $8,500 pretending to rent out a home he didn't own to strangers on Craigslist. In court, he pleaded guilty to theft and was sentenced to 30 months behind bars. 

Priests are all about forgiving sins and keeping them secret, but there's a point where that goes too far and the Department of Homeland Security steps in to put a stop to it. Mississippi priest Lenin Vargas-Gutierrez and the Catholic Diocese of Jackson reached that point in 2018. As reported by the Dispatch, in 2015 Vargas-Gutierrez admitted to a bishop that he had HIV. While he and the church had every right to hide his condition, they did it in every wrong way possible.

Vargas-Gutierrez pretended to have cancer, asked parishioners to fund his treatment, and then used the money on a dating site for people with HIV, "a sexual addiction facility for priests," and other mostly non-medical expenses. He also asked people to help pay for a nonexistent orphanage in Mexico, which they happily did. He received $9,210 through GoFundMe, a $21,500 check from his own church members, and a $2,300 "love offering" from another church. The DHS clearly wasn't cool with all the love Vargas-Gutierrez was getting, and conducted a raid on his diocese.

Law enforcement determined that the Diocese of Jackson absolutely knew the priest was lying to parishioners but decided dishonesty was the best policy. Maybe they figured Vargas-Gutierrez could confess his sins later and be forgiven. If so, they were kind of right — he wasn't charged with anything.

All Jeremiah Smith wanted was to fill his days with pot, booze, dart tournaments, and video games. By themselves, these were perfectly harmless goals, assuming Smith didn't drink and throw darts at the same time. But what he did to make his mundane dreams come true was so ambitiously ridiculous you'd have to be high to attempt it.

Per the New York Daily News, Smith told his wife and a friend that he had Stage 4 terminal cancer and only had 18 to 25 months left to live. Then he lowered it to six months. Somehow, he was going to have to convince a group of people who knew and cared about him, one of whom lived with him, that he was not only sick, but actually about to die. He had no medical records, no oncologist, and for obvious reasons never let his wife go with him to appointments.

Smith quit his job and proceeded to not die while devastated people performed loving acts of charity. His friend Darlene Asher raised $6,000 for him through a dart tournament and told CBS that some friends helped pay for his wedding. Smith made over $6,800 through GoFundMe. In total, he stole over $23,000, but got caught because his wife finally got suspicious. He pleaded guilty in court and got sentenced to 10 years of probation.