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I am Amira, the breadwinner for my family after my father's death. We were forced to flee to the southern part of Gaza after the war intensified. Our home, my university, and my workplace were bombed😢.

We are now in desperate need to escape this danger and continue my dream and educational and professional journey💔. I kindly ask you to donate or share the campaign link. Your support can save our lives and give us a chance to live in peace🍉.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart🙏.

Hey folks! Let's have a quick conversation about charity scams, because God love you little peanuts but you are spraying my dash with this "Save Amira/Noor/Abdullah's family/etc" shit these days.

In brief: if you want to help the people of Palestine, give to a legitimate organization, like the UNRWA (as I have). Individual "Palestinians" or "Palestinian families" reaching out to solicit donations are overwhelmingly going to be scams.

"But I reblogged it from someone who said that this fundraiser was verified!" The person saying that is either (1) in on the scam, (2) actively the one running the scam, or (3) painfully naive. "Verified" by who? How? They never say. It's always just some shit like "I've known Amir for 12 years and he's like a brother to me, that's how I know his heart is true." I can say that too. I just made Amir up, but our bond is real and his Facebook profile is 100% legitimate. Please consider his need for €30,000 verified.

I get it, I really do. You want to DO something to alleviate all some of this suffering, and helping an individual or a specific family feels more real than giving to a faceless organization. That's why those "for only one dollar a day, you can feed this specific photogenic child in Africa, who will make you a piece of bespoke macaroni art as a token of his love and gratitude" organizations do so well. Attaching a face to the suffering motivates donors. Reputable charities like Save The Children know that, and so do scammers.

But when you allow scammers to take advantage of your empathy and your desire to help, you are directing money away from the people who need it. You are directing energy away from where it would do some good.

Charity scams have surged since Israel's invasion of Gaza. Some scammers set up entire fake websites pretending to be legitimate relief organizations. Some scammers hack or spoof legitimate Palestinians' e-mail and social media accounts in order to solicit donations. But all of that is a lot more work than putting together a photo collage of some rubble + some attractive Arabic-looking people in what plausibly might be Gaza, setting up a GoFundMe, and copy-pasting the same message to a few hundred or thousand accounts on social media. Like...this is literally the lowest effort scam out there. Social media monitoring tools have tracked a 40% increase in scam-related content since the "All Eyes on Rafah" movement gained momentum.

Some of these Rafah crossing GoFundMes are legitimate. It is deeply unfortunate that there is no easy way to tell them apart from the frauds which vastly outnumber them. For those who are pained by these appeals for aid, and want to give to an individual or a family instead of a reputable relief organization, please consider:

There are more than 800,000 refugees in Rafah at this point.

Egypt only lets a very small number of people through the crossing every day. I've read numbers as low as 150 and as "high" as "a minimum of 500," with 250 being the figure reported most.

Every one of those people needs to pay between $6000 and $15000 to make the list. If you get added to the list but miss your window, due to lack of internet connectivity or, you know, any of a hundred other reasons why the people in Rafah might not be able to check a fucking website right now, you lose your place, lose your money, and have to start the whole process again.

To put it bluntly: every person who pays to make the Rafah crossing is taking one of a horrifyingly small number of slots away from the other 800,000 refugees, and it's not even a guarantee of escape. And the more money that gets funneled into this process, the higher that price will rise, as corrupt and opportunistic travel agencies and Egyptian officials gouge desperate people for as much as they can get.

This is not an effective way of spending your money. Unless it's for your personal family, in which case, yeah, obviously you do everything you can to get these people specifically out of Rafah. But if you just want to "help the Palestinians?" You're not.

Which brings us to Amira here!

Clicking through to Amira's GoFundMe brings you to this little gem, organized by an "Abdallah Alanqar," which features the kind of writing I'm more used to seeing from clickbait retellings of Reddit posts designed to get you to look at ads.

"When sorrow and difficulties strike hard, hope becomes the lone star in the dark sky. This is the story of Amira, a 23-year-old girl who found herself bearing the burden of her family after her father's death three years ago due to the coronavirus."

Am I...am I meant to believe this is her bedroom? Amira's personal bedroom? This is clearly catalogue photography.

"After her father's passing, Amira found herself taking care of her family, consisting of her mother, sister Noor, and brother Abdulrahman. Her mother, suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes, faces health problems that further complicate their situation. But courage and determination drive Amira forward."

Good, great, well-lit stock footage of rubble, gotta have some of that. The same photo collage is also used in this GoFundMe for "Mohammed Alanqer," also run by "Abdallah Alanqar." That one's a little better, Abdallah clearly at least raided someone's actual Facebook page for family photos. Amira's here has no photos of her at all, and just one selfie on her Tumblr.

Mohammed also has a Tumblr! The pinned post starts with: "Hello, my name is Mohammed Alanqar, and I am from Gaza Palestine 🇵🇸. I write to you today with a heavy heart💔, seeking hope and help. The ongoing conflict has put my family's life in grave danger🙏." Weird how this ostensibly 36 year old man writes exactly like our 23 year old Amira.

Also, if you go to Mohammed's Instagram, it's 100% interior design photos from either AI or magazines - you know, the kind of stuff you usually see on fake Instagram accounts - until July 12th, at which point it suddenly switches to tons and tons of photos of this one Arabic family. I hope they're alive, whoever they are.

It goes without saying that if you Google any of the names of the people mentioned in these GoFundMes, the only thing that comes up is the GoFundMe and the promotional social media surrounding the GoFundMe. That's weird, right? Mohammed ostensibly had a start-up (not that we're told what it was called). Amira was a student. You'd expect that Googling their names would turn up something.

Anyway, back to Amira.

"Amira worked as a teaching assistant at the university while pursuing a master's degree in data science, and also worked as a programmer in a company. Her life was going smoothly until war came and destroyed everything."

Just "the university" and "a company." No details, nothing that would let us actually look up if Amira exists or not. (They also include more stock footage of rubble here, I'll spare you.)

"Her university, workplace, and home were completely destroyed, forcing them to flee south in search of a safe haven. Now, Amira and her family live in tents for displaced people in Deir al-Balah, where they suffer from water shortages and the spread of diseases, posing an additional challenge, especially for her immunocompromised mother."

Note that they don't say fled south from where. I'm not sure about the relevance of the photos here; is this supposed to be depicting the dirty, abysmal conditions in Deir al-Balah? Because this is just what outdoor cooking looks like. I had an identical meal in the backyard of a Lebanese family I knew growing up. This looks like a nice day. The close crops + blurred edges on these photos are there to make it harder to find the original images sources, btw.

Blah blah blah, you get the picture. This is nothing. Amira doesn't exist.

"But her post says she was vetted!"

Sure enough, her pinned post does feature this:

I don't know any of these people offhand and wouldn't blindly trust them with my money, so let's dig a little deeper, shall we?

Nabulsi's post is not "vetting." It is an uncritical reposting of the information (and images...) in Amira's GoFundMe, without any additional comment or context.

Fairuzfan's post is just a wordless reblog of - oh, what's this? A post by "Ameera Alanqar," as in, our OP? Just a different blog run by our good friend Amira here? And all of the posts on that blog are about Amira and Mohammed, and how much of your money they need?

Sar-soor's post is just a wordless reblog of Nabulsi's post. Again, no context or further information provided.

Aaand 90s-ghost's post is just a wordless reblog of the same post, again, reblogged from @amira-alanqar, a blog which has now been deleted. Add it to the list with @amira-world and @ameera-anq.

I found another deleted blog called @palestinian-fundraising which put a big "VERIFIED AS REAL" stamp in red across the bottom of these posts, with a link that just goes back to...Nabulsi's reblog. None of this is vetting. None of this is anything.

I know you're upset. I know you just want to help! I know you want to do anything, even if it's small, even if it's just reblogging the words of some desperate young woman or family man in the hopes that it gets them a tiny bit closer to safety and peace. But you are accomplishing nothing but putting money into the pockets of scammers. Amira's GoFundMe has raised €17,826. "Mohammed's" GoFundMe has raised €48,958.

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

#Rb’ing because I’ve started to see “Palestinian” e begging a little too frequently on my dash #I really don’t want my moots or regular followers falling into these traps #Unless the person asking for aid has a legitimate and traceable internet footprint it’s best to assume the worst #There are vile people out there and they are very determined

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