Scammers use photo of boy who died of cancer to attract followers

Social media like-farmers have used the photo of a boy who recently died of cancer to lure users into sharing a post on Instagram.

A scam on Facebook-owned Instagram has highlighted once again the lengths that like-farmers will go to trick social media users into sharing their content.

Like-farming refers to the various techniques used by scammers and spammers to trick others into engaging with posts and pages on social media by using a combination of deception, exploitation and manipulation.

Popularly, scammers use fake competitions or giveaways to trick social media users into engaging with a post or page, but there are other, more disturbing methods as well. And one such method is to steal photos of sick children, post them on social media and claim that sharing or otherwise engaging with their photos will help them. Most of our regular readers will be familiar with this type of like-farming. Frequently they come attached to captions like “every share and $1 will be donated to life-saving medication“.

Stealing photos of injured or sick children is unscrupulous enough, but it’s even worse when these spammers use photos of children who have passed away. This was the case recently when the parents of Bailey Cooper found out through mutual friends that a photo of their son – who had passed away in 2017 from cancer – was being shared by social media users on Instagram.

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Spammers had stolen a photo of Bailey and urged users to share his photo. The caption attached to his photo identified Bailey as “Declan”, and claimed that he had recently been diagnosed with cancer and that it was his dream to have English footballer Harry Kane attend his birthday party, and that sharing the photo would help make that happen. The spammers had also set up a fake GoFundMe page to solicit fake donations.

One of the posts urging Instagram users to share a post.

Bailey’s mother, Rachel, from Bristol, had reported the photos, but it was some time before Instagram acted and taken the offending page down. The page was reported to have over 45,000 followers.

This isn’t the first time that like-farming spammers have used photos of children who have passed away, as we have previously reported.

It’s another case that demonstrates why we need to be careful about the things we choose to share online, and especially on social media. It’s also another reason why it’s important to be aware of like-farming scams and how they work so we can avoid engaging with posts like this.