A heartless Grinch has been posing as the family of a Tsawwassen teen with a rare form of cancer to possibly scam people out of donations online, police say.
Delta Police are warning the public that an apparent scam Twitter account and crowdsourcing campaign are soliciting donations for 18-year-old Kyle McConkey, who requires special treatment in Seattle for a rare form of Leukemia.
McConkey’s family set up a campaign on the crowdsourcing website YouCaring and exceeded their goal of raising $250,000 for an experimental procedure to save his life.
That was the good news.
Then on Friday night, Delta Police were notified of an apparently fake Twitter account and another YouCaring page appearing to have plagiarized parts of the McConkey’s story from the original fundraising website. On one page, his name was changed to "Kyle McKluskey."
“On the apparently fake site, the names and some spellings are wrong but close enough that anyone not familiar with this story could be duped,” police said in a Facebook post. “This site is in no way related to the McConkey family.”
The Twitter account is still active, while $372 was donated to the apparently fake fundraising website before it was listed as “not active.”
Police say the domain name of the apparently fake website was only registered Friday.
