Use Caution when Donating to Charities on Facebook

Unfortunately Facebook is becoming the newest opportunity for fake charities wanting to scam people out of their hard earned money. Due to the ease of use and opportunity to get a message out to thousands of people instantaneously, many scammers have found Facebook to be their preferred playground.

The current Facebook scam centers around horse rescue and horse slaughter. Unfortunately for the horses, it is all too easy to set up a Facebook page and call yourself a Horse Rescue, Horse Re-homing center, or even a Horse Angel.

The latest case involves a faux horse rescue named "New Jersey Horse Angels" a long with other aliases such as NJ Kill Pen Horses or The Forgotten Horses. This particular Facebook scam page was set up and run by Sharron Crumb and her convicted felon live in boyfriend Frank Wickoff.

Crumb first got her hand involved with the horse community on a forum called Alex Brown Racing. She was among the original "FOB's" or Fans of Barbaro. When questions were raised on that forum about missing funds for a Barbaro celebration event organized by Crumb in 2007, she changed tactics and took her scam to Facebook.

Crumb was allegedly collecting donations on Facebook to save horses from shipping to horse slaughter in Canada. Crumb would post pictures of horses at kill buyer auctions (most notably the Camelot Horse Auction in NJ) and beg her Facebook friends and fans to "send bail money to save the horses!" She also encouraged everyone in her friends list to cross post her pleas to their Facebook pages.

Estimates are that Sharron Crumb had over 3000 Facebook friends on her many Facebook pages. Now imagine if even half of those people cross posted her scam to their Facebook pages, and you can easily see how this woman managed to rake in thousands of dollars with very few questions being asked.

Since 20-30 horses run through the kill buyer auctions run every week without fail, Crumb was able to use Facebook to take in and scam people out of over $145,000.00 in less than a year. Crumb was collecting on average $200-300.00 per horse to "save them" every week on Facebook. Even though people were starting to question how she could place 20-30 horses a week into good homes, she simply deleted their comments from her Facebook page and refused to answer any questions or post any accounting of where the donated money went, or even where the "saved" horses went.

As the criminal investigation into her Facebook fund raising continues, many things are now known regarding the donations that were sent in to help save horses from slaughter. Over $61,000.00 of the donations she took in were allegedly used for gambling vacations to Atlantic City, personal bills, eating out, jewelry for her ex con boyfriend and money sent to support her son (serving a life sentence) in prison. To see the court filing from the Attorney General of New Jersey media.lehighvalleylive.com/phillipsburg_impact/other/NJ%20Horse%20Angels.pdf

Sadly, Crumb is just one example of the many scams run on Facebook every day. Even now there are several more questionable horse rescues scamming people out of their money to "save the horses." The most disheartening aspect of this scam, is that it will make it harder for legitimate horse rescues to take in donations.

In the future, I hope that Facebook will issue a policy on people running "charities" on Facebook and enact strict guidelines for any non-profit organization asking for donations.

I can only imagine if it is this easy to scam thousands of dollars for horses, how much is being scammed in the name of children?