When your family is going through a hard time, the last thing you need is people making it worse. One Texas family has been supporting their son as he battles cancer, and using social media to document their journey over the years. But now, online scammers are using the boy’s photos to create fake fundraisers.
The boy’s dad is speaking out about the toll these online scammers are taking on their family. It’s something they shouldn’t have to deal with.
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Lee Galloway lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, with his family. His 9-year-old son Julian Galloway has been battling brain cancer since 2019. The family travels back and forth every month between their home and Houston for the boy’s treatments. Lee told KTRK that the family is “thoroughly and emotionally worn out.”
Throughout Julian’s cancer battle, the Galloway family has used a Facebook page to share updates. What started with “a few hundred people” now has “several thousand followers,” Lee explained.
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When they started the Team Julian page, the Galloway family couldn’t have anticipated how many people would be moved by the boy’s story. But now, social media has become a bit of a burden for the family. Lee explained that online scammers have begun impersonating the family online, and using pictures of Julian to solicit fake donations.
“It was never in our thoughts. It was just a way to tell people all the exact information. We were so brand new into the cancer journey,” he explained.
He reports the pages as he catches them, he said. But one of his biggest complaints is that social media sites don’t make it easy to report online scammers.
“Sometimes there are things you want to report that don’t fit into any of the categories on their reporting page on any of the social media sites. When you don’t click the right thing and no one actually sees it, it’s just some AI that says we’ve reviewed this and it doesn’t violate any terms of use. That’s frustrating,” he said.
Lee told KIII that most of the online scammers seem to be on TikTok. “I know people like TikTok, but they are completely unresponsive to every type of request that’s been sent, I was really hoping that ban would stick,” he said.
So far, he said he hasn’t “seen it spread out in other places. I do check, I try and reverse search some of the images to see if they’re popping up in other places.”
“It’s infuriating, is the the kindest word that I can say,” Lee said.
