Written by: Etrit Rexhepi
A video is published requesting financial assistance for the treatment of a girl who is allegedly suffering from cancer.
video was published on July 2 (Wednesday), by a Facebook page named "Together for a new tomorrow".
What is the truth?
Hibrid.info has found that the aforementioned claim is fraudulent.
The post claims that a woman named Natalia and her husband Andrej have a little girl, who appears in the video, named Sofia. The latter is said to have undergone 27 chemotherapy treatments.
Hibrid.info has researched this video using the automated search program “InVID” and found that it has also been distributed in other languages, with the same narrative (see here).
All of these posts have the same link attached at the end (see here).
Hibrid.info has also checked this link. The site's domain (get.sunshineforkids.com) uses the subdomain (“get.”) with a long URL structure. The text uses emotional words like “I don't want to die.", while at the bottom of the page no verifiable information about the organization is clearly visible, such as a physical address, official documentation, or charity certificate.
After checking with two platforms (ScamAdviser and ScamDoc) for evaluating website domains, the results showed that the content of this link may be suspicious (see here and here).
Also, on the international platform for consumer business ratings, TrustPilot.com, some users who have shared their experiences with the website “get.sunshineforkids.com” have raised suspicions that it may be a scam (see here).
Hibrid.info found that “www.sunshinekids.org"" is the official website of The Sunshine Kids Foundation, a charitable organization that provides activities and emotional support for children being treated for cancer in hospitals across North America.
Other pages that have a similar name to this foundation may be fraudulent and solicit donations without providing clear information or verifiable activities.
Hibrid.info also checked the Albanian-language Facebook page that published the video discussed in this article. All posts on this page are about seeking donations for the child featured in the video. Apart from the link provided in the post, there is no information about the page's activities in the data section. It was created in April of this year, and the locations of the people who manage it are Israel and Portugal.
Analyze:
The request, via video, for financial assistance for the treatment of a girl suffering from cancer is suspicious.
The video has been distributed in multiple languages with the same narrative, while the donation page has no verifiable information and independent assessments indicate that it may be a fraudulent scheme.
Based on its work methodology, hibrid.info assesses the content as "Fraud".
Reasoning:
The “Deception” rating is given to informational content that is manipulated in terms of visual (deepfake, cheapfake), audio, or textual content to deceive the audience. This form of deception is usually used to produce false and manipulated content.