A viral GoFundMe that raised about $745,000 for an 81 year old Texas man and his wife has been shut down, and every donor is getting their money back. GoFundMe pulled the campaign after learning that the organizer, who called herself a kind neighbor named Erin Howell, is actually the couple’s daughter.
The fundraiser was titled “Help Don Retire.” It told the story of Don Johnson of The Colony, Texas. In the post and the video, “Erin” said she watched an elderly man slowly haul her heavy luggage up a steep flight of stairs, so she stepped outside to help him. She wrote that he told her he was 81 and working around the clock delivering luggage to make ends meet. She said he was doing it all to support Josephine, his wife of 57 years, who is battling cancer.
The viral GoFundMe took off from there. The video spread across social media, local news picked up the story, and donations poured in until the total reached nearly three quarters of a million dollars.
On September 25, GoFundMe got a tip questioning who “Erin” really was. The company’s Trust and Safety team, the group that investigates fraud and rule violations on the platform, got the organizer on a recorded call. They asked her directly whether Don and Josephine were her parents, and she admitted they were. She also admitted she filmed the viral video herself.
She told GoFundMe she invented the neighbor persona because she believed her parents’ story would reach more people if it came from a stranger who was moved by it. She thought that would work better than their own daughter asking for help. She maintains that everything else in the campaign is true, from her father’s job to her mother’s diagnosis.
For GoFundMe, the lie itself was enough. In a statement, the company said its Trust and Safety team found factual misrepresentations that directly violate its Terms of Service. As a result, the fundraiser was removed and all donors were refunded. GoFundMe’s rules require organizers to be honest about who they are and how they are connected to the person receiving the money. Family members are allowed to raise money for their own relatives, but they have to say so.
GoFundMe has made clear that the Johnsons’ hardship is not what got the viral GoFundMe pulled. The company has not accused the family of making up Don’s job or Josephine’s illness. The problem was the invented narrator.
That leaves an 81 year old man who, by every account so far, is still working to pay for his wife’s cancer care. The $745,000 that briefly looked like his way out is gone. It also leaves thousands of donors who thought they were backing a stranger’s act of kindness, only to learn the story came from inside the family.
Viral fundraisers for working seniors have become a regular thing online. Earlier this year, strangers raised about $950,000 for an elderly couple delivering for DoorDash, and in that case the good Samaritan really was a stranger. Don’s campaign followed the same formula, with one key difference.
