He said he had cancer and raised $23,000. He spent it on booze and games, police say

Everyone in his community thought he only had six months to live — even, for a while, his wife.

But now a Faribault, Minn. man has been charged with theft by swindle for allegedly pretending to have terminal, stage 4 cancer and raising $23,000 total to cover medical expenses, according to WCCO. He could face 10 years in prison if convicted.

“People contributed over $20,000 to help pay for this, which again, he blew on things that he wanted to spend money on,” Rice County Attorney John Fossum told WCCO. “And the people who contributed feel betrayed because how could you feel anything else.”

Instead of spending the thousands he’d raised on cancer treatment, Jeremiah Jon Smith, 37, allegedly spent the money buying marijuana, paying off his credit cards, buying alcohol and playing a video game called “Clash of Clans,” a criminal complaint reviewed by WCCO reveals. Police first received a tip about the alleged scam in May, KMSP reports.

Two fundraisers held by his community in 2016 raked in $9,000 and $6,600 a piece, KMSP reports. Smith even allegedly targeted donors online with a page on GoFundMe, an online fundraising platform, where he garnered $6,800 in donations as well.

Smith, for his part, was allegedly so committed to the scam that he quit his job a month after he began telling others about his cancer “diagnosis,” according to KMSP.

But his wife got suspicious because her husband wouldn’t let her come along to appointments he claimed to have with a specialists, and because he wouldn’t show her medical record to prove he had cancer, the Associated Press reports.

Eventually Smith told police that he would come forward with medical records detailing his cancer diagnosis, KARE reports.

But when he failed to produce them, authorities got a warrant to see the records for themselves — and they discovered that there had been no cancer diagnosis, according to KMSP.

“I’m fairly confident that Mr. Smith was the only one that was aware that he wasn’t sick when they were planning these fundraisers,” Fossum, the prosecutor, told WCCO.

More scams out there

The Minnesota case is far from the first time someone has allegedly used internet crowdfunding like GoFundMe to scam unsuspecting do-gooders.

Last week, in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, Nevada’s attorney general warned that “there are many illegitimate GoFundMe accounts and sham charities” trying to make money off the tragedy, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. And even before Hurricane Irma struck Florida last month, scammers were creating bogus GoFundMe pages, Miami New Times reports — with one even claiming to be created by singer Jason DeRulo.

Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt suggested avoiding scams in online fundraising by being cautious, doing thorough research and reporting suspicious GoFundMe pages, per the Review-Journal.

But the good news is that online fundraising scams don’t appear to be rampant: Fraudulent campaigns make up less than one-tenth of the campaigns on GoFundMe, according to the website’s security and transparency page.

“GoFundMe has taken action and banned the individual and will provide refunds to all donors upon request,” GoFundMe spokesperson Bobby Whithorne said in a statement. “Our platform is backed by the GoFundMe Guarantee, which means that in the rare case that GoFundMe, law enforcement or a user finds that funds from a campaign are misused, donors are fully protected and will get refunded.”

This story was originally published October 10, 2017 at 7:57 PM with the headline "He said he had cancer and raised $23,000. He spent it on booze and games, police say."