Tonight's picture was taken in July of 2003. Mattie was a one year old and it was his first trip to the beach! As you can tell from Mattie's face, he wasn't a happy camper. He disliked the feeling of the sand on his feet and the sound of the waves scared him. This was our one trip to the beach during that entire week long vacation. That did not stop us though, for two more years after this visit, we brought Mattie back to the Outer Banks. By the second year, Mattie began to appreciate all the fun one could have on the beach, particularly for him..... building and creating!
Quote of the day: I like to use the hard times in the past to motivate me today. ~ Dwayne Johnson
While on a conference call last week with a social worker from Kentucky, she told me about a cancer scam that was perpetrated on innocent people for 7 years. The name given to this particular scam is Scamanda. A play on the word scam and Amanda, the name of the fraudulent cancer patient.
The reason the social worker told me about this scam was because Mattie Miracle received a request for money from a mom, whose child supposedly had cancer. We are very eager to support children with cancer through our M&M Wishes program. To date we have supported 12 children. So I have seen several applications and received many letters from hospitals confirming the diagnoses and treatment plans of our awardees. However, this most recent application from Kentucky caught my attention. There were many red flags to me in both the application, and in my emails with the mom and social worker. In fact I would say it was the social worker which truly caused me to pursue this issue and contact the professional I know at the treating hospital in Kentucky.
All I can say is THANKFULLY I did! My contact was able to look into the hospital's health records. Yes the child was seen at this hospital, but ONLY for well visits. The child has no significant disease and certainly no cancer diagnosis. In addition, the hospital has no record of the social worker I interacted with being employed at this hospital system.
After learning this knowledge, I reached out to several of our fellow non-profit friends to let them know about this particular applicant and social worker. I wanted them to know that this would be a fraudulent request and to be on guard.
Turning to Scamanda, I posted an 8 minute video about the scam below. We think of crimes being committed by unscrupulous people. But Amanda was a mom of two children, lived in California, and was a principal of a school! Not your average looking criminal. But for 7 years, Amanda was able to con people out of money, gifts in kind, meals, and people even donated blood and plasma to her cause. Needless to say, she received over $100,000 and all that money was used for personal expenses. She took her role seriously as she wrote blogs, posted videos of her shaved head, of her supposed chemo infusions, and truly prayed on the emotions of people for years.
Having had a REAL childhood cancer journey, I can understand the feelings of support, the incredible generosity, kindness, love, and attention one can receive when such a tragedy strikes a family. I remember it all too well. Mattie's blog would have 1,000s of viewers each day, we received emails, text messages, cards, gifts of all kinds, daily meals for over a year, and if we needed something, within minutes we would have five of whatever we requested. Yes this can be an amazing and overwhelming feeling. In fact, this is one of the blessings I always reflect upon with Mattie's diagnosis. Through cancer, I learned about the incredible love, support, and compassion that people have within them and are willing to share. Most definitely this can be addictive and I know when Mattie died, it was an earth shattering reality for me to know that our community support for the most part died with Mattie. It isn't as uplifting to provide care and support to grieving parents.
That said, I can't imagine cooking up a cancer journey for personal gains. Not only does this disrespect any individual and family struggling with this hateful disease, but it should be a crime to swindle people out of money for a fake cause. Amanda is serving a five year prison sentence, but I can imagine that everyone and anyone who supported her would now be leery to help others in the future. What a world we live in, but it reminds me as a Foundation leader that I need to remain vigilant. As we want the funds we raise to support actual children and teens with cancer and I am grateful that I have installed safeguards into our application process to try to avoid such scams.
Podcast reveals woman’s fake cancer scam
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