After Cannon Hinnant’s death, fake GoFundMe pages appeared. What happened to the money?
In the days after 5-year-old Cannon Hinnant was killed in Wilson, N.C., dozens of GoFundMe campaigns were launched to raise money for the child’s family.
Almost all of them were fake.
As the tragedy received national attention, a wave of people began trying to raise funds, preying on the family’s loss. It’s a sad but consistent trend on the crowdfunding platform, as opportunists try to manipulate national attention into schemes to take money from unsuspecting donors.
Now, weeks after the child’s death on Aug. 9, most of the pages have been removed. The page started by Cannon’s grandmother is still there.
Gwen Hinnant told The Wilson Times she could only vouch for the account she had created and didn’t know where the money from the other pages would end up.
A GoFundMe official confirmed that it had removed several pages related to Cannon Hinnant’s death, but he wouldn’t say how many. The company declined further interview requests.
“GoFundMe is continuing to monitor the platform for all new fundraisers created to support the Hinnant family and our Trust and Safety Team is working to ensure funds are transferred directly to the family,” GoFundMe spokesman Patrick Mahoney said in an email to The News & Observer.
Similarly, when you search for GoFundMe accounts related to the recent killing of a Garner teen, Veronica Baker, some of the campaigns redirect you to pages that read “Campaign not found.”
Opportunists and tragedies
The Hinnant story — and subsequently, the funding effort — quickly received national attention, raising more than $800,000 on GoFundMe for the family who had originally sought $5,000 to cover the boy’s funeral.
Laurie Styron, the executive director of CharityWatch, a watchdog group, said it was not surprising to see so many fake campaigns erupt on the platform.
“Opportunists swoop in on the coattails of legitimate tragedies to capitalize on emotionally charged moments at their most viral peaks,” Styron told The News & Observer in an email. “They often disappear just as quickly before anyone has a chance to scrutinize their legitimacy or reasonableness.”
GoFundMe says it tightly monitors for bad actors on its platform, and that it depends on community members to flag pages. The crowdfunding platform employs an algorithm that will take down campaigns suspected of fraud, and its trust and safety team also combs through campaigns for misuse, Mahoney said.
According to Mahoney, misuse is rare — less than one-tenth of one percent of all fundraisers, he said. The website has a page with information to teach users how to determine if a campaign is legitimate.
He added that if someone had donated to a Cannon Hinnant campaign page that was taken down, the money would be refunded to the donor, though the company’s terms say that would only happen if the donation was $1,000 or less. Otherwise, the platform provides a redeemable credit for an equivalent donation to another campaign.
GoFundMe also requires verification of the potential beneficiary before it releases funds from a campaign. Before money is withdrawn, the site asks for a recipient’s phone number, address, Social Security number and an uploaded photo of a driver’s license or passport and a bank statement.
Funds don’t fix “root causes”
Styron says these efforts are largely reactionary as opposed to proactive. Another problem, she said, is that when a campaign is removed from the site for fraud, this can discourage donors from giving again in the future.
“Given the scale at which it operates and the urgency with which many of these appeals for help are presented,” she said, “it’s highly doubtful that any crowdfunding model can provide a thorough vetting of every campaign before it’s launched.”
She said it’s each donor’s responsibility to determine if what they are reading is legitimate. However, people donating $5 to $20 are not going to invest a lot of their time attempting to investigate the campaign, she said.
However, CharityWatch officials have a larger concern: Just a small number of cases are getting large donations, while leaving their root causes untouched.
The Hinnant family’s GoFundMe went viral, in part, because a narrative formed around the death that the media wasn’t covering it because it involved a Black man and a white child. That was despite the Hinnant family themselves telling The Wilson Times, “This is no racial issue.”
While the cases that go viral usually reflect trends around national issues, crowdfunding campaigns cannot address the underlying societal issues that have created the needs in the first place, like institutional racism and poverty, medical and education debt, or other complex issues, Styron said.
“A few individuals whose stories are highly publicized are sometimes flooded with more resources than they could earn in ten lifetimes, while leaving most others in similarly dire situations to fend for themselves,” Styron said. She said the platforms are “not equipped to distribute funding in a way that will improve the lives of entire communities.”
Styron said crowdfunding platforms should consider putting a cap on the amount one campaign can raise — a move that could limit waste and potential fraud.
That step could encourage people to “think more about how to address the underlying issues affecting all the people impacted by a societal problem,” she said, “as opposed to flooding only one highly publicized victim of a tragedy with a lottery winning level of donations.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published August 28, 2020 at 10:26 AM.