This week on The Perfect Scam.

I could hear people saying stuff, like,

did you hear Jeremiah sick?

I went and talked to his fiance and she informed me

that Jeremiah had stage four kidney disease and several

forms of cancer that was incurable. Everybody, doing anything and everything to try to make the last months of his life memorable.

Everybody was giving, giving, giving.

I thought to myself, he looks pretty darn good for having less than six months to live.

Generosity. It's such a beautiful human quality born out of a selfless desire to help other people, even perfect strangers.

And like so many human qualities, the internet has supercharged our capacity for

generosity.

Now, we can help strangers across the world with a few clicks of a mouse.

Folks in need we might never have even heard about before.

And tech tools make this even easier.

One generosity website, GoFund Me, has facilitated 15 billion dollars.

That's with a B billion dollars worth of donations since 2010.

That's all very wonderful. But criminals are very adept at corrupting this amazing

force for good, supercharged generosity and turning it into something that's pretty evil.

Today's story will probably send a few shivers up your spine,

maybe even make you rethink some of the donations you've made in your life.

We don't want to crush anyone's generous heart, but we do want to make sure you understand

that there are people out there who will abuse your spontaneous acts of love.

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