When Hanna Dickenson was 19 years old, she told her parents she had been diagnosed with cancer.
It was leiomyoscarcoma, and she wasn’t responding to treatment at the Epworth and Peter MacCallum hospitals in Melbourne.
She had just six weeks to live unless she underwent lifesaving treatment in Thailand and New Zealand, she said to them.
So, in 2012, her parents, two farmers who struggled financially, asked their friends and family for help.
Their daughter was dying, and they would do anything in power to save her life.
In a matter of months, they raised $41,770, obtaining the funds from family and friends.
Neighbours Nathan and Rachel Cue took money out of their mortgage to donate $20,000 to the Dickenson family.
And then, they logged onto Facebook.
Dickenson was not, it would seem, undergoing special treatments overseas. In multiple pictures, she was featured drinking and partying – an activity that seemed incompatible with her life-threatening illness.
The Cue family contacted the police.
“I spent a fair bit of time sussing things out,” Nathan Cue told Channel Nine. “I was 100 per cent scammed.”
Another man, who had just been discharged from hospital himself after cancer treatment, donated $10,000 to Dickenson’s cause.
Top Comments
If a guy did same fraud crimes would get 2 years in jail,clearly proved women get less jail time for the same crime ??
This is the flip side of crowd funding sites - and I suspect this sort of thing is happening more often than people realise. The other thing I see a lot of is people with genuine illnesses, crowd-funding for "medical expenses" that would already be paid for by the public system. Commonly those "medical expenses" actually pertain to unfunded, unproven (yet very expensive) natural remedies or trips to overseas clinics that essentially bleed the patient dry of finances before sending them back to Australia to die. It's lovely that people are generous to others in need, but sometimes it is also important to consider exactly where your money is going.