New Jersey couple Mark D’Amico and Kate McClure, and Johnny Bobbitt, the homeless man they raised more than $400,000 for on GoFundMe, are expected to be charged with conspiracy and theft by deception, according to reports.
The Burlington County, New Jersey, Prosecutor’s Office has announced a news conference for Thursday afternoon where Prosecutor Scott A Coffina says he will make announcements about the fight over more than $400,000 raised by a New Jersey couple on GoFundMe for a homeless veteran, Johhny Bobbitt.
His case garnered national headlines after he was said to have given his last $20 to a woman who ran out of gas late one night in November 2017.
Could it be that all three were in cahoots and made up the whole thing?
Charges are expected to be announced, not only against Mark D’Amico and Kate McClure, but also against Bobbitt, according to WCAU.
D’Amico and McClure turned themselves in Wednesday, the station reported, but all three are facing charges that include conspiracy and theft by deception, according to the station.
The Philadelphia Inquirer also reported that charges are expected to be announced at the news conference.
The law enforcement investigation into the dispute over the $402,000 raised by McClure and D’Amico began in September, when the couple were a no-show at one court hearing in Bobbitt’s lawsuit against them, alleging that they were holding out on Bobbitt, then told a judge that portions of the money were “missing.”
Adrienne Gonzalez, who tracks fraudulent GoFundMe campaigns on the independent website GoFraudMe, told NJ.com that the Bobbitt case, if it is a fake, is the biggest case of GoFundMe fraud she’s seen.
“I have never seen ANYTHING close to this in the three years I’ve been covering GoFundMe fraud,” she said, according to the website.
But, if it was a scam, it’s far from the first time this sort of scheme has been cooked up:
In May, Martin and Jolene LaFrance, a couple in Upstate New York, were arrested and charged with a scheme to defraud when they allegedly raised about $3,000 on GoFundMe by falsely reporting that their son, who was 9 at the time, had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to Syracuse.com.
The boy was also invited to meet and break an end-of-practice huddle with the Syracuse University football team, the website reported.
In March, a man in New Jersey was accused of beating his own dog to death, lying about the dog’s injuries in a GoFundMe campaign and taking in about $14,000 in donations.
Reid M. Herjo told the GoFundMe audience that his dog had been run over by an all-terrain vehicle, and he was charged with animal cruelty and theft by deception, Medford Township police wrote in a Facebook post.
In April 2017, prosecutors said that a 31-year-old Nevada woman spent months faking the terminal illness of her 10-year-old son, bilking GoFundMe donors of $2,000, according to The Associated Press.
Victoria Morrison was convicted of neglect or endangerment, causing mental harm in May, and was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison, KOLO reported.
J. G. Spooner was convicted in February 2017 for setting up a fake GoFundMe campaign he told donors was for a childhood friend who had cystic fibrosis, according to WJW-TV. His fraudulent campaign raised about $6,000 before he was caught.
Spooner also had his hands in several rent scams and bad check scams, police said, according to Cleveland.com.
The town of Rome, Georgia, rallied around the family of Barry Sutton, a civilian contractor in Afghanistan, when he was killed by a car bomb in 2015, according to the Rome News Tribune.
Just one problem. The administrator of the GoFundMe campaign in Barry Sutton’s name, a family friend named Brandy Holder, was allegedly skimming from the proceeds. Holder pleaded guilty in October 2016 to theft by conversion after withdrawing more than $4,000 of the approximately $5,000 raised for her own use, the newspaper reported.
In one of the only cases that approaches the amount of money in the dispute between Bobbitt, D’Amico and McClure, a Canadian woman in 2014 claimed that she had a rare neurological disorder called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) in a GoFundMe campaign, according to the Hamilton Spectator.
Cynthia Smith of Burlington, Ontario, thought she was getting away with the more than $126,000 that her campaign raised, before donors and family members began poking holes in her story. She was charged with fraud over $5,000 initially, but later pleaded guilty to fraud under $5,000, while the vast majority of the money she withdrew from the campaign was never recovered, the Spectator later reported.
