Greg's Corner

Cancer patient targeted in scam

By Greg Collier

A Utah woman who is currently undergoing cancer treatment almost fell victim to a scam at probably the most vulnerable time of her life. As you may expect, her treatments are expensive, and she was looking for any kind of financial assistance to help pay her medical bills. She received a message from a Facebook friend who offered to help her apply for a grant that would help pay for her medical expenses. With some of her treatments costing thousands of dollars each, she was open to the idea.

If you’re a regular reader, you already know this is a common scam that takes place on Facebook. These grants that ‘friends’ keep promising don’t actually exist. In a typical grant scam, the victim will be directed to a phony website where they’ll be asked for all their personal and financial information. Then the victim will be asked for a payment under the guise of a processing fee.

This is precisely what happened to the Utah woman. She was directed to a website to fill out an application, but in the middle of the process she got a bad feeling and cancelled the application.

She messaged her Facebook friend saying she was going to think about it. The friend started pressuring her to complete the application. When the woman insisted she wasn’t going to, the Facebook friend disappeared.

As you can probably surmise, her Facebook friend had their account hacked and taken over by scammers. Who knows for how long, but it was long enough to find someone who was battling an expensive illness.

Any financial grant giver, whether it’s from the government or a nonprofit, will not approach you. You need to search them out first. Unless your Facebook friend works for the government or non-profit, it’s very unlikely they are going to put in the legwork for you.

That’s not to say there aren’t any assistance grants out there to help you. We recommend going to the USA.gov website to help you find any legitimate grants you may be eligible for.