Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgz318y8elo

by 1659447091 • 7 months ago

533 356 7 months ago

SilverElfin2• 7 months ago

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?

zwnow8• 7 months ago

Well before one can go into jail there must be a trial. I am not religious but for people like this I sometimes hope hell would exist.

Braxton1980• 7 months ago

What do you think the effect would be if, after a trial, everyone in the scam organization was executed?

vladms• 7 months ago

Maybe for this case Batman would be a better solution. Hell would not prevent the damage being done on the short term.

toolslive• 7 months ago

there's also "remand" or detention before trial. One example where this is common is when there's a flight risk, or a risk the subject will influence the investigation.

peanutz454• 7 months ago

This is part of the reason that people do not donate.

teekert• 7 months ago

At least not when some rando stops you on the street.

zwnow8• 7 months ago

I always donate to the random homeless people stopping me on the street. Doesn't really matter to me what they do with it, whatever keeps them warm.

kakacik2• 7 months ago

Part of comfy self-excuse for sure. And then burn the money on junk food, legal or illegal drugs or worse.

bragh• 7 months ago

Why should somebody donate to somebody else's luxuries if they could spend it on their own luxuries?

Anyway, yes, direct donation is always better, be it to some random guy down on his luck in the street (unless they have just missed their bus and need ticket money for the next one and so for 3 years in the same bus station) or to some trusted person/group who actually does deliver the stuff to the area. Way too many random NGOs have popped up in Europe promising to do good things, just transfer money to their bank account and they will take care of it all for you.

UrineSqueegee2• 7 months ago

all the big charities are scams, my partner works for an adjacent industry

jjcob3• 7 months ago

I've worked with an organisation that was on the receiving end of a popular charity, and they definitely got something (new playground equipment for disabled children). Can't say how efficient the charity was, but there are definitely charities that don't keep all the money for themselves.

mlrtime3• 7 months ago

Maybe not scams, but I agree they are bad.

I always tell people to donate as local as possible. Ideally local Shelters, Churches (that take in everyone) etc...

Animats• 7 months ago

"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...

pksebben• 7 months ago

is it normal for these places to have 0 liabilities? That alone seems like it ought to raise a flag - if you're not spending the money...

Edit: Clicked through some of the other entries in there and yeah, usually liabilities are relatively close to incomes. How the system didn't catch this is beyond me.

jdranczewski• 7 months ago

The article says they visited both the US and Israel registration addresses and didn't find the organisation's offices. I was impressed by the amount of "on the ground digging" by the journalists here!

jjcob3• 7 months ago

Pretty impressive work. I always wondered what all those correspondents do that news organisations employ all over the world. I guess that's one of those things.

mlrtime3• 7 months ago

It's really not that hard to find someone to go to check a address, redditors do this all the time. It should be expected as basic journalism, especially with high claims.

boringg2• 7 months ago

I agree - I noticed this as well. Also feels like it such an upsetting story that someone was motivated to really to the bottom of it. They also probably knew that if the story got traction people would be running down there own checks.

I mean it does feel like that should be standard operation for journalism on bigger stories but I think our expectations from journalists have really fallen over the last 5 years with all the slop coming in.

eleveriven5• 7 months ago

The fact that the website is suspended while the donation machinery was clearly active is… not a great sign

chaostheory2• 7 months ago

The article names Erez Hadari as someone involved with the organization.

JumpCrisscross3• 7 months ago

Chance Letikva is registered with the US IRS as a charity

At what point do audit requirements kick in for charities?

alwa• 7 months ago

The behavior that this article outlines is outrageous. But it makes me uncomfortable for this to be the kind of place where anonymous strangers self-investigate lurid allegations against random accused, no matter how disturbing the allegations.

Most of us don’t have the tools or the time to do it properly, at least on here; and that can end badly [0]. It rarely achieves a thoughtful considered outcome, and there are other places to do that kind of thing if you want to—some of those communities, like Bellingcat, seem pretty well-practiced in their methodologies, and their findings seem to have accordingly high impact.

[0] e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-22214511 … and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi

bryan_w• 7 months ago

Namecheap

Namecheap and scammers -- I dare you to name a more iconic duo.

ktallett3• 7 months ago

It is disgusting that those with health issues are scammed. I do think these instances require extra time on sentences. As someone who was a regular at a cancer hospital in my life, there is nothing harder than seeing a child and a parent who are clearly going through so much at a hospital at 8am. You realise all that they have gone through the whole time, and how much their life has changed, possibly permanently. It is hard for an adult, of course it is, but children have done nothing for this to happen.

Shuddown• 7 months ago

This has to be one of the most vile scams I've ever seen. Hopefully with awareness will come justice.

whatever1• 7 months ago

I am not religious. But if there is hell…

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 7 months ago

There is not in the religion of the alleged key player in the scam.

VagabundoP• 7 months ago

One of the others might make an exception to allow them in theirs.

hrisen• 7 months ago

In a lawless world, I'd like to show them hell!

stef25• 7 months ago

Surely they'll be using AI to make these videos in the not too distant future.

timthelion• 7 months ago

This is already happening alot with gaza. On Mastodon wehad manyduplicate accounts with very similar AI videos asking for money...

mikerbrt2000• 7 months ago

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.

Nextgrid• 7 months ago

I hope the authorities bring this person to justice and arrest them for fraud.

They haven’t scammed nor inconvenienced a rich, well-connected person, so unlikely anything will happen. Remember that online fraud is effectively legal (10% of Meta’s revenue is from scam ads by their own estimates) as long as you only target the poor.

These scam campaigns have been going for years with people operating in the field across many countries - if there was an incentive to stop this it would’ve been done already, but since everyone’s making money why bother?

file a complaint if you find something suspicious

Which will be piped to /dev/null, just like reporting scams on social media.

intended3• 7 months ago

Tangentially related - If you aren’t aware, there are out of court settlement bodies which exist as part of the DSA.

If you have content which is removed, or a moderation decision you wish to dispute, you can go to one of these bodies to get it reviewed. It cannot go to dev/null.

This doesn’t address whether flagging scams resulted in action. The bigger picture is the mismatched incentives for tech. Platforms are not quite incentivized to care about responding to user complaints, and do not give out information that lets us know what is happening independently.

To get to the point that complaints are actioned, those incentives need to be realigned. The ODS pathway, if used more frequently, increases that revenue and market pressure.

The ODS system is new, and I expect it will have tons of issues to discover. I wouldn’t be surprised it it is already weaponized.

On the flip side, platforms haven’t been tested or queried in this manner before.

spiderfarmer• 7 months ago

Trump will probably compliment him, call him smart and pardon him. https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2019/donald-j-trump-pays-cou...

throwaw123• 7 months ago

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

nrhrjrjrjtntbt4• 7 months ago

Google, the worlds biggest and best coconspiritor.

actionfromafar• 7 months ago

That's so Meta.

throwaw123• 7 months ago

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.

Andrew_nenakhov• 7 months ago

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.

zaphirplane• 7 months ago

Does clicking on the ad cost the spammer a lot of money

yalok• 7 months ago

In my experience, anything related to Google Ads - they never reacts to any claims of scam…

Their incentives contradict healthy behavior… :(

jjcob3• 7 months ago

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.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 7 months ago

I'm waiting for the non-tech world to wake up and hold companies that act as willing accomplices liable for the crimes they tolerate on their platforms.

pjc502• 7 months ago

Oh, they know that. It's very lucrative. At this point it's scams all the way up to the US presidential cryptocurrency.

However it's also a tricky business to be the adjudicator of what is and isn't a scam. You're going to have to deal with a lot of complaints from "legitimate businessmen".

17186274404• 7 months ago

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

felixyz• 7 months ago

The tech world knows this. They are raking in money off of these scams. People with a rudimentary moral compass leave, those without stay, which makes it even less likely that industry will self-sanitize. The rest of society, out of survival instinct if nothing else, will have to force it to stop anti-social and fraudulent practices. Same as many other industries.

intended3• 7 months ago

I think being a “Techie” is now something that is splitting.

- People who want to work in tech because it was a stable and/or lucrative career

- People who just want/love to code

- People who loved tech / think tech is cool

There’s also a degree of counter-culture that used to be part of the mix, which got jettisoned as tech became mainstream and mapped out.

The current state of Tech is unpleasant and alarming.

xgulfie• 7 months ago

They already know. Meta estimates around 10% of its ad revenue comes from ads for scams or banned goods. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

neilv• 7 months ago

It would help to stop saying "brightest minds of our generation", like we stopped saying "smartest guys in the room".

They are not the brightest, just the ones who sold out others and grabbed the money, with ethics and morals not being sufficient personal barriers.

Calling them the brightest just feeds their belief that they merit the money, and they don't have to ask the real reason they have so much money.

mrguyorama3• 7 months ago

I'm waiting for the tech world to realize that "the brightest minds of our generation" don't actually work at google, because if you are that enormously bright you don't want to work for ads or in an opaque megacorp.

Why does anyone think a brilliant mind would enjoy that? So they could make a little bit more money?

Do you honestly think brilliant people, the smartest of our generation, care about money?

IME, Google software devs aren't even the brightest minds in the parking lot.

Completing large engineering projects says nothing about individual capability, and nothing about how Google deploys shitty AI moderation and about how Google employees insist it's great and perfect and never does anything wrong gives me any reason to believe they are even competent.

It's literally a meme that people started repeating in earnest without a second thought.

Don't you think a brilliant person would work somewhere, like, interesting?

In economies where you aren't rewarded for individual competency (because software management couldn't pick out individual competency if it screamed at them), highly competent people aren't going to play the game, they are just going to find something to pay the bills and work on hobbies.

The smart people are often where the money isn't, because they are rarely driven by monetary pursuits.

CGamesPlay• 7 months ago

Once you realize how profitable it is, it's hard to stop. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10...

gmerc2• 7 months ago

see Meta, which is operating like a crime syndicate, leveraging higher fees on scammers "to discourage" them, retaining their impact on supply side auction prices and well knowing many don't pay with their own credit cards.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampan...

BoredPositron• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

oefrha• 7 months ago

Scams are extremely high margin businesses and as such can spend very generously on advertising. Consequently the Googles of our world love them.

eleveriven5• 7 months ago

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

throw310822• 7 months ago

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.

htrp• 7 months ago

reminder that according to Facebook's own analysis 10% of their 2024 revenue comes from scams and banned products

ryukoposting• 7 months ago

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.

anArbitraryOne• 7 months ago

"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?

throwfaraway1352• 7 months ago

Or it's just BBC doing BBC stuff.

graemep• 7 months ago

Possibly it means white by the standards of the culture and language the statement was made in.

micromacrofoot2• 7 months ago

it's likely referring to colorism within the country, generally lighter is viewed as favorable

tchalla• 7 months ago

The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.

dev0p• 7 months ago

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.

HlessClaudesman• 7 months ago

Some people seem to exist in a bubble where they believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them or their loved ones, so paying to improve society has no benefit to themselves.

gmerc2• 7 months ago

You mean what's happening right now in US healthcare?

lo_zamoyski2• 7 months ago

It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to

We’re not billiard balls. We have agency. Nothing causes a human being to choose to commit immoral acts vs. immoral acts. A human being may be put in a situation that may entice that person’s corrupt desires (we used to call this temptation), and responsibility while mitigating culpability is possible when someone’s rational faculties are overwhelmed, but the choice remains.

Blaming systems for theft is scapegoating and an evasion of responsibility. (To make this clearer by distinction: a starving man taking bread from an overstocked warehouse during a famine is not choosing to commit an immoral act; he isn’t stealing in the first place, as some share of that bread is his).

nickpp12• 7 months ago

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.

hermanzegerman9• 7 months ago

With Universal Health Insurance as all other developed countries do

selfmodruntime3• 7 months ago

By tax. If you use taxes for nothing else, at least use them for children with cancer.

Joker_vD• 7 months ago

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.

NamlchakKhandro• 7 months ago

LLMs have found your post and ...

You're absolutely right.

KingMob3• 7 months ago

And plane crashes are always caused by gravity.

eleveriven5• 7 months ago

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

xeonmc• 7 months ago

    Local man embezzles $20,000 meant to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine.

philipallstar3• 7 months ago

No-one is hoarding a free and easy supply of treatments. They're all hard-won advancements. The vulnerability is there by default.

delfinom• 7 months ago

but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it

I mean almost the entirety of the US healthcare system is a industrialized scam engineered by middlemen

MSFT_Edging2• 7 months ago

doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it

The incentives are there. Our economy runs on incentives. Create a vulnerable group and the sharks smell blood in the water.

hermannj314• 7 months ago

Whether taxes, health insurance, the Church, or gofundme, technically all life saving care is mostly crowd-funded. Maybe not in some Wild West dystopia, but generally the pooling of funds seems to work better than solo funding.

Involuntary, progressive crowdfunding through government threat of violence (taxes) seems to work better than the other methods and most consider it humane. Americans have shown little interest historically in doing the humane thing, unfortunately.

huijzer• 7 months ago

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?

secretsatan• 7 months ago

That doesn't seem at all right, even misleading, cancer survivability has significantly improved

HighGoldstein• 7 months ago

Untold trillions have been spent fighting wars and yet the cause of war hasn't been solved.

shawabawa3• 7 months ago

Progress in cancer treatment has been incredible

Just one example, prostate cancer today has a 90+% 10 year survival rate, in 1970 that was 25%

aaronharnly• 7 months ago

According to this US government site, 5-year survival rates across all cancer sites have improved from 50% to 75% between 1974 and 2017. (For men it started at more like 40%).

That’s not utterly transformative but I wouldn’t call it negligible either.

https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival

PurpleRamen• 7 months ago

There are more than 200 known types of cancer, and most are very fundamental and serious. It's not something which can be easily prevented or even fixed by just taking some pill or eating different. Yet, progress has been very phenomenal over the decades. Cancer can be cured to some degree, people can survive, but progress goes type by type.

meindnoch• 7 months ago

Demonstrably false. There are immunotherapies today that can completely cure cancer.

throwaw123• 7 months ago

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.

ivape3• 7 months ago

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.

input_sh2• 7 months ago

Yes, it's called Form 990 and it is a requirement to publish it on a yearly basis to retain non-profit status. You can search for any US-registered NGO here for example: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their executives.

redleader55• 7 months ago

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.

IAmBroom2• 7 months ago

I think you meant to say "havens". Or, I hope you did.

bko9• 7 months ago

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

k1musab1• 7 months ago

Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down. What is it that still makes you believe that two (or n-number) of providers won't collude to charge an astronomical amount for a life-saving treatment?

Retric3• 7 months ago

You’re confusing ideology with the way the world actually operates.

The general public doesn’t have enough information to make informed decisions when it comes to healthcare. This alone completely removes the usual market forces from providing any benefit when it comes to healthcare.

Cancer treatments don’t inherently cost that much money, the systems to ensure people are actually getting useful treatments are expensive. You can’t trust companies selling cures. You can’t trust every doctor when they have financial incentives to offer treatments. Insurance companies are in an adversarial relationship with providing treatments, which doesn’t result in efficient supervision here. Lawsuits offer some protection, but at extreme cost to everyone involved. Etc etc.

The net result of all these poor incentives is single payer systems end up being way more efficient, resulting in people living longer and spending less on healthcare.

charles_f• 7 months ago

it put price pressure and competition on providing the service

This is simply not true. Healthcare in the US is comparatively much more expensive than countries offering subsidized healthcare with comparable or better outcomes(1).

it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system

Capitalism can't work in a market that's completely consolidated, and where people can't offer to not buy your service. Healthcare in publicly subsidized countries is much less expensive because it's regulated. Compare the price of simple drugs like insulin or asthma medicine if you need an easy example. Pharma companies still happily sell there, which is to say that the difference is pure profit on the back of sick people who don't have a choice.

My biggest grief against this individual payment system is moral though. I don't see the virtue in a system where kids have to put on a show to receive care. Or anyone for that matter, you'll give to a kid because they're cute and generate empathy, does it make someone ugly with no family less deserving of getting cured from cancer?

1: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

ruszki• 7 months ago

When you have to choose a provider or you die, there won’t be a real downward pressure on price because there is no need to form a cartel to feed on this. You can see this in every single market of utility or de facto utility segments.

jgeada3• 7 months ago

Because when you're dying you have no bargaining position. You can't just wait it out. And you're just a single client, whether you personally die or not does not meaningfully change their bottom line.

So it is a highly asymmetric bargaining situation where all the incentives are poorly aligned. Of course it is exploitative.

binary1323• 7 months ago

thieving and scamming are not caused by the existence of scarcity

micromacrofoot2• 7 months ago

Right, how much are crowdfunding platforms and payment processors making off of the desperation of people who can't afford medical treatment?

contravariant2• 7 months ago

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.

IncreasePosts• 7 months ago

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

why-o-why• 7 months ago

The replies to this comment make me so depressed.

xnx• 7 months ago

Politely, no. The root cause is 100% this a-hole scammer and his accomplices.

throwfaraway1352• 7 months ago

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.

Neil44• 7 months ago

The world seems to be full of virtuous sounding organisations who are actually evil.

isolli• 7 months ago

Fraud in cancer research is sadly prevalent.

France cancer fraud trial begins (1999) [0] (the head of the charity was found guilty, imprisoned, and fined)

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/352075.stm

ekianjo2• 7 months ago

I would extend it to fraud in charities in general. Trusting a third party (unknown to you) to handle your money responsibly is not a smart move.

Loughla2• 7 months ago

Are you saying all charities are frauds? That's how that comes across.

otikik2• 7 months ago

Of all the people that you can scam, why go for children with cancer. I guess you think they are an easy target because they are desperate? Pure sociopath mentality. Crab mindset.

otikik2• 7 months ago

In case any sociopath is reading this: just go for old rich people. They are also desperate because they are alone, seeing their relevancy wane, and their deaths are closer every day. A single successful scam will represent a bigger return of your invested time and effort than, compared 10 successfully scammed children with cancer. And they might not even make a fuss if you steal some money from them, it will make them look weak and it will only represent a small percentage of their wealth.

And you are less likely to be killed by a mob, as a bonus.

uxx2• 7 months ago

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.

bjord2• 7 months ago

all of the content on your site is clearly LLM-generated

uxx2• 7 months ago

not mine, they started using ai images a lot though lately but check the old articles.

xandrius• 7 months ago

This is an ad-hominem attack, not cool.

throwaway1988467• 7 months ago

The vast majority of fraud have noting to do with Israel wage theft is enormous everywhere and have nothing to do with Israel, the biggest fraudsters in history (mostly scams on USA investors like Theranos and 2008 crisis) according to quick Google have nothing to do with Israel. The obvious attempts to mafacture a negative image couldn't be more obvious.

worldsavior• 7 months ago

So what? Every Israeli now is a scammer? Are you racist?

Do you know how many scammers are from India? Do you know how many scammers are from the US? Jeffery Epstein was from the US, is every US citizen now a pedophile?

How the country origin is related to them being scammers? They're scammers because they're shitty people, it's not related where they're from.

Ozzie_osman• 7 months ago

It's worth noting that if the suspect is in Israel, and he nerds to be tried in the US it might be an uphill battle trying to get him extradited.

https://jacobin.com/2023/02/israel-law-of-return-extradition...

lloydatkinson• 7 months ago

It’s so predictable by this point

throwaway1988467• 7 months ago

Do you believe all countries should automatically extradiate every person any other country demands? Or that there should be a limit on such process?

colinb• 7 months ago

It definitely seems uphill but not infinitely so.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-55795075.amp

Though that case, returning an alleged, now convicted child rapist took decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malka_Leifer_affair

As a not-Israeli Jew the reluctance of the Israeli government to send alleged criminals for trial overseas doesn’t make me happy, but I also remember that there are some reasons for this.

jsmith99• 7 months ago

Unfortunately many countries have blanket extradition bans. US is one of the worst - it caused a lot of tension in the past when they wouldn't extradite IRA bombers but got UK to agree to extradite anyone US wanted.

chaostheory2• 7 months ago

According to the article Erez Hadari, the man supposedly affiliated with the organization, is in Canada at the time of writing

cowpig• 7 months ago

Side-note: imagine how much work law enforcement has put into these kinds of cases over the years only for the perpetrators of fraud to be pardoned.

Can't imagine how many people who work in law enforcement are furious with the current administration.

chinathrow• 7 months ago

One year later, Khalil died.

These monsters.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 7 months ago

I love the photo the guy sent, of himself sitting in a first-class airplane seat.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/b676/live/3589b...

gampleman• 7 months ago

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.

cluckindan4• 7 months ago

Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent.

Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application.

Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.

birktj• 7 months ago

The argument is that scams based on exploiting goodness causes a lot more harm compared to the ones based on exploiting greed. Because it trains people that doing good deeds is not worth it (they might be scammed.) And even if the rate of such scams are low, just reading about them makes people afraid of potential consequences of doing good deeds. So I absolutely agree that such scams should have very harsh punishments, because they do not only have immediate consequences, but they degrade trust in our society.

wanderingmind• 7 months ago

The jury pronounces the sentence. What do you think sways the jurors - legalese complexity or straight up morality?

cheschire2• 7 months ago

What is the definition of right and wrong if NOT a moral one?

JumpCrisscross3• 7 months ago

maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent

Retribution is a real component of justice. When it's ignored, people take the law into their own hands.

Harsher sentences for despicable crimes makes sense. Automatic sentence enhancers are cruel. But automatically giving the judge the power to sentence for longer based on the victim's profile is not.

doodlebugging2• 7 months ago

Social mores are synonymous with morals and it is our social mores or our moral values that form the basis of our legal systems where we use those mores (moral values) to define the actions that fall into the categories of right versus wrong and help us define how we should treat each other and what an appropriate societal sanction should be when someone steps over the line and does something to violate our social mores or does something that we consider immoral.

By comparison it is pretty obvious that most societies have similar moral values - stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, charity is right, etc. in spite of the differences in religious interpretations that end up preventing so many of us from simply coexisting as equals.

To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong. Morals are simple rules that humans have developed over generations of interactions that allow them to apply reasonable judgements to fellow humans based on observations of how those fellow humans interact with strangers and kin.

Religions likely have as part of their foundations, an explicit acknowledgement or recognition of the societal mores that governed human interactions before any one of our ancestors invented or postulated out loud about phenomena that they all experienced but did not yet have the science or understanding of the natural world to reliably explain, thus compelling them to invent entities that controlled those phenomena. Those who chose to believe in these inventions could rest easier knowing that something somewhere was either looking out for them or they could be wary of angering that entity to prevent bad things from happening to them or their kin.

In short, morals and ethics exist outside of any religious dogma so the suggestion that they are a constraint imposed on any society through religion is simply inaccurate since it is not necessary for any person to be religious in order to hold another accountable .

eleveriven5• 7 months ago

Whether sentencing should reflect that is a hard question, but pretending all fraud is morally equivalent seems like willful blindness

WesolyKubeczek• 7 months ago

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.

eleveriven5• 7 months ago

If BBC journalists can donate $5 and see the counter move, how are these campaigns not triggering internal red flags?

trhway• 7 months ago

These campaings? I've paid some minimal cursory attention to 2 pretty randomly chosen charities - once i donated an old car, and another time i thought may be to subscribe to do math tutoring to children, the tutors were unpaid volunteers, and i just looked into what financial info was available for that non-profit ... well after those 2 times i've never even thought about any dealing with any non-profit, etc. and the stories in the news like when a famous radio talk show host would fund raise huge money to be later paid from his non-profit to his vacation ranch business, all in the open daylight, don't surprise me at all or all those stories of Trump's charities.

philipallstar3• 7 months ago

To be clear: the children are not scammed. They're (unwitting) paid photo props. The people giving are scammed out of millions.

marcusb2• 7 months ago

I think the kid in the article who got $27k raised in his name for cancer treatment, received $0 in cancer treatment from those funds, and subsequently died of cancer definitely got scammed.

philipallstar3• 7 months ago

If I come up to you and show you a photo of an elephant and keep the $100 you gave me to help it, did you get scammed, or did the elephant?

juanparati• 7 months ago

This is nothing new, greedy bast*rds taking advantage of desperate people.

In this book an old NGO worker explain very well how it work the business: https://books.google.dk/books/about/Blanco_bueno_busca_negro...

callamdelaney• 7 months ago

I recall seeing these ads, I thought the whole thing was fake to be honest - which it really felt it was due to the obvious staging and scripting.

trollbridge6• 7 months ago

I thought they were AI due to the heavy use of filters / AI enhancement.

ck2• 7 months ago

I mean Musk almost singlehandedly has killed hundreds of thousands of kids worldwide in 2025 alone by destroying USAID medicine and basic nutrition distribution, while it literally rots in warehouses now

If we are going to have cancer stories and gun violence stories daily in the news, shouldn't the kids dying be a daily coverage?

Credit to BBC who every few weeks does show the kids dying in the hospital but US news does not mention it anymore since the summer

Still dying. More in 2026. Even more in 2027. Even more in 2028.

Even if USAID is restored in 2029 it will take awhile to rebuild and all those dead kids aren't coming back ever.

Oh and they didn't just quietly die. They suffered for weeks, months and died

Musk did that. But yeah keep using X and buying his cars

Boogie_Man• 7 months ago

""...Well- What does he deserve? To be shot? To be shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!"

"To be shot" murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale, twisted smile."

"Bravo!" Cried Ivan delighted.

boringg2• 7 months ago

Honestly sometimte people are the absolute worst - I feel like there no bottom to depravity.

broretore2• 7 months ago

Wow, what a blast from the past -- I went to high school with a guy named Erez Hadari.

grugagag• 7 months ago

There’s a photo of this person in the article, you can verify if it’s the same person you know

nafizh• 7 months ago

The BBC has increasingly been anti-semitic. First, the baseless allegations of starving and murdering children in Gaza and now this. Troubling times.

whatamidoingyo• 7 months ago

How is the article anti-semitic?

juliusceasar2• 7 months ago

So, exposing jew criminals is anti-semitic?

jessepasley• 7 months ago

Always has been ;)

ozzymuppet2• 7 months ago

What kind of monsters would do this... so angry!

ozzymuppet2• 7 months ago

What kind of monsters would do this?! Pure evil, makes me so angry!

juliusceasar2• 7 months ago

He will soon move to Israel and escape his punishment.

Pesthuf• 7 months ago

Many such cases

hearsathought• 7 months ago

Isn't that just for "jewish" pedos and rapists?

fahhem• 7 months ago

Everyone associated with this seems to be Jewish. Israel is a haven for criminals of all types, we just care extra about any haven for pedos and rapists, but white collar criminals are terrible, too

krebsonsecurity• 7 months ago

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 davidm@yeahdim.co.il.That 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.

broretore2• 7 months ago

Please do

neom• 7 months ago

BBC has some details, I was disheartened as a Canadian to learn someone living in Canada is behind it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj3lTCiv6I0

sharts• 7 months ago

Not a great look for Israel

everdev• 7 months ago

Why do we keep allowing greedsters to eat our culture alive?

silexia• 7 months ago

Scammers should get the death penalty.

Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

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