How children with cancer were scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
A little boy faces the camera. He is pale and has no hair.
“I am seven years old, and I have cancer,” he says. “Please save my life and help me.”
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Khalil – who is pictured above in a still from the film – didn’t want to record this, says his mother Aljin. She had been asked to shave his head, and then a film crew hooked him up to a fake drip, and asked his family to pretend it was his birthday. They had given him a script to learn and recite in English.
And he didn’t like it, says Aljin, when chopped onions were placed next to him, and menthol was put under his eyes, to make him cry.
Aljin agreed to it because, although the setup was fake, Khalil really did have cancer. She was told this video would help raise money for better treatment. And it did raise funds, Ksh3.48 million, according to a campaign we found in Khalil’s name.
But Aljin was told the campaign had failed, and says she received none of this money, just a Ksh91,000 filming fee on the day. One year later, Khalil died.
Across the world, desperate parents of sick or dying children are being exploited by online scam campaigns, the BBC World Service has discovered.
The public has given money to the campaigns, which claim to be fundraising for life-saving treatment. We have identified 15 families who say they got little to nothing of the funds raised and often had no idea the campaigns had even been published, despite undergoing harrowing filming.
Nine families we spoke to – whose campaigns appear to be products of the same scam network – say they never received anything at all of the Ksh516 million apparently raised in their names.
A whistleblower from this network told us they had looked for “beautiful children” who “had to be three to nine years old… without hair”.
We have identified a key player in the scam as an Israeli man living in Canada called Erez Hadari.
Our investigation began in October 2023, when a distressing YouTube advert caught our attention. “I don’t want to die,” a girl called Alexandra from Ghana sobbed. “My treatments cost a lot.”
A crowdfunding campaign for her appeared to have raised nearly Ksh90.3 million.
We saw more videos of sick children from around the world on YouTube, all strikingly similar – slickly produced, and seemingly having raised huge amounts of money. They all conveyed a sense of urgency, using emotive language.
We decided to investigate further.
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.
Identifying the children featured was difficult. We used geolocation, social media and facial recognition software to find their families, based as far apart as Colombia and the Philippines.
