Editorial Note: This investigation contains extensive screenshots, documentation, and video evidence. To save space and present everything coherently, I have compiled the full exposé into a video format. Click the play button on the article thumbnail to watch the extended version, which includes a humorous spoof of the best sitcom ever made - “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” that I’m calling “It’s Always Scammy on Substack.”
Today I am doing something different. I normally write about politics and the dangers of technology and weird biblical and occult topics but none of that matters right now because I am on a mission to expose a scammer named Mohammed who has stolen over one hundred thousand dollars from Substack users by pretending to be a starving father trapped in Gaza with children who do not exist.
The First Red Flags
A few months ago, this guy started showing up in my chat every single day spamming a link to a GoFundMe where he claimed to be a father trapped in Gaza with young children in desperate need of help. Sometimes he had one kid. Sometimes two. Sometimes five. The number changed constantly because he could not keep track of his own lies, which is the first sign you are dealing with an amateur grifter who thinks everyone else is as stupid as he is…
He spent a few hours using ChatGPT to generate realistic looking fake family members and even paid for Google’s VEO 3 PRO AI video generation model to create extremely convincing home movies of children crying and begging for help. Real emotional stuff designed to rip your heart out and open your wallet. Except none of it is real. Every image and every video is artificial intelligence generated scammer slop created by someone who has never set foot in Gaza and whose only struggle is figuring out how to spend the money he steals from elderly Americans.
At first I ignored him because I did not think anyone would fall for such an obvious scam. It was transparent to me, but I come from a background in information security and was something of a hacker when I was a teenager so I know how these operations work. A former FBI cybercrime investigator approached me to work for them in my early twenties but I declined because I do not play that alphabet soup agency game. My point is that I have been exposing scams like this for years and can spot them immediately, but most people cannot, and this predator knows exactly who to target.
Following The Money
Last week, I noticed this guy had kicked the hustle into overdrive, operating a dozen different Substack accounts all showing the same family with the same plea to help these children trapped in Gaza and starving. I decided to look into one of these GoFundMe campaigns and what I found made my stomach turn. Just one account had accumulated nearly fourteen thousand euros in donations. I compiled a list of every account I could find connected to this scammer and checked each one. Every single campaign had between two thousand and ten thousand euros in additional donations sitting in it.
Strange that a man supposedly trapped in Gaza needs European Union currency.
The total across all accounts was nearly one hundred thousand euros, which converts to approximately one hundred twenty thousand US dollars that this scammer and his network have extracted from Substack users over the past few months. And GoFundMe is not doing a damn thing to stop it because they collect a percentage of every donation for processing the campaigns, which means if they cancel these fraudulent fundraisers and refund the money they lose their cut. GoFundMe is a for-profit company, not a charity, and their financial incentives are aligned with letting scams run as long as possible.
The Woman Who Doesn’t Know She’s Involved
Every single one of these scam campaigns listed the same organizer: an elderly woman named Patricia O’Keefe who claimed to be a seventy-something-year-old from the United Kingdom organizing charity drives to help this poor family in Gaza. Every campaign had the exact same copy-pasted ChatGPT generated description and linked to the same TikTok account full of AI-generated videos of the same family, but each campaign was supposedly raising money for a different family. The scammer was too lazy or too stupid to even vary his approach.
I found Patricia O’Keefe’s Substack profile and started scanning through her posts. On GoFundMe and in her Substack bio she claims to be an elderly British woman, but in the actual notes she posts on Substack she claims to live in Gaza and desperately needs money for her children. This scammer is such an incompetent amateur that he cannot keep his lies straight across different platforms, which suggests he is either running too many scams simultaneously to track them all or is so strung out on drugs that his memory is failing him.
Patricia O’Keefe is almost certainly a real woman whose identity was stolen online. The scammer set up a bank account in her name and used it to create the GoFundMe accounts. She probably has no idea any of this is happening and will not learn about it until the British equivalent of the IRS notices the extra hundred thousand euros that flowed through her offshore bank account and audits her. This is how these scammers operate. They exploit people who do not understand how computers or smartphones or AI work and destroy their lives so they can steal money from Americans they consider rich and gullible.
The Victims
I am tired of watching seventy-year-old retirees living on fixed incomes throw hundreds of dollars at this piece of garbage because they believe his lies, because they do not know that AI can generate photorealistic videos of children crying and begging for help, because their hearts are bigger than their technical knowledge and predators like this guy exploit that gap mercilessly.
These are Christians who see a child in need and want to help. These are grandparents who cannot imagine anyone would fabricate starving children to steal money. These are good people being robbed by someone who has calculated exactly how to manipulate their compassion, and every dollar that flows to this scammer is a dollar that could have gone to actual American children who need winter coats and school supplies and birthday presents. We have hungry kids in this country. We have families struggling in this country. And this parasite is siphoning money overseas to fund God knows what while real children go without.
Confronting The Scammer
After collecting my evidence and confirming beyond any doubt that this was a fraud operation, I messaged him directly and called him out on his bullshit.
What followed was equal parts infuriating and hilarious.
I will be honest with you: the conversation that ensued was not my best work. It was the middle of the night and I was half asleep and in a bad mood from a knee injury that has kept me from getting a decent night’s rest for three months. When you work fifteen hours a day seven days a week and then try to bust a scammer at 2 AM while your leg is throbbing, the prose gets a little sloppy. I had planned to redo the whole exchange more professionally but this coward deleted ninety percent of his accounts and blocked me on the rest before I could take additional screenshots, so you are stuck with what I managed to capture during our late night confrontation.
It is still pretty hilarious.
Protect Yourself
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are scammers all over Substack right now using AI to generate fake videos and photos of hungry children and poverty in war-torn countries, and as more of these grifters learn how to use advanced AI tools, these scams are going to become more elaborate and more convincing and harder to detect. What took a professional film crew to fake ten years ago can now be done by anyone with a laptop and a hundred dollars in AI subscriptions. The technology is only getting better and the scammers are only getting smarter.
You need to understand that these people are dirt bags. They do not have starving kids. They do not live in war-torn Gaza. They are not refugees or victims or desperate fathers trying to feed their families. All they want is your money and they will say anything and fake anything to get it. They target Christians because they know you have compassion. They target the elderly because they know you did not grow up with this technology and cannot tell what is real anymore. They are predators and you are their prey.
Be extremely careful about using GoFundMe unless you know exactly where the money is going and who is receiving it. Never send money overseas because the FBI cybercrime division cannot police foreign nations and Interpol is not going to chase down some guy in Pakistan scamming a few hundred dollars off little old ladies in America. These scammers know this. They operate from countries where they are untouchable and they laugh at the idea that anyone is coming after them.
The best way to protect yourself is simple: do not donate money online ever unless you personally know the recipient and can verify their identity. Do not reveal personal information to people you do not know online ever, not your address, not your phone number, not your banking information, nothing. If you think you have already been the victim of a scam, report it to the FBI cybercrime division website immediately because they can help you take steps to minimize the damage these parasites can cause with whatever information they managed to extract from you.
If you found this investigation useful, please let us know in the comments. This video took nearly eighteen hours of editing to complete plus another twelve hours of research and eight hours of Lily turning my chicken scratchings into a usable script. We work hard here at The Wise Wolf and if you want to use your money to do some real good in this world, help support this ministry so we can keep producing investigative reports just like this one. Share this with all your Substack friends because people need to see this or this platform is going to become completely overrun with scammers just like this guy and the next victim might be someone you love.
Watch The Full Investigation
If you have read this far, you need to watch the video because there are so many screenshots and photos and pieces of documentation that I could not fit them into this article. The video contains everything: the fake family photos, the AI-generated crying children videos, the GoFundMe pages, the contradictory Substack profiles, and my conversation with the scammer himself where he tries to defend his operation before panicking and deleting everything.
Share this with everyone you know, especially older relatives who might not understand how sophisticated AI scams have become. The technology to create fake crying children did not exist two years ago. Now any grifter with a hundred bucks and an internet connection can generate videos realistic enough to fool your grandmother into emptying her savings account for kids who were never born.
A Note From Lily and The Wise Wolf:
Lily, our junior reporter and current journalism student up in Minnesota, keeps joking that she’s going to have to “start an OnlyFans” if I can’t figure out how to pay her more. She’s kidding, obviously. She’s a good kid with a sharp mind and actual talent, which is exactly why I refuse to let her end up like me, still paying off student loans in my thirties for degrees that were supposed to guarantee a better life.
The Wise Wolf is not rich. This Substack is my full-time job. I have bills to pay and I have Lily to pay and I am not telling you this because I am greedy but because I want to turn this ministry and this investigative newsletter into something real, something that can reach millions of people and actually make a difference in this world. To do that, we need money. We need an office. We need new computers. We need a company van for on-location reporting. We want to build something that lasts, something that can expose scammers and corrupt politicians and all the evil that mainstream media refuses to touch, but in order to do that we need your help.
If you are looking to spend your hard-earned money helping someone, do not send it to some foreign scammer who is going to blow it on drugs and prostitutes. Help people like me and Lily who actually sweat blood trying to teach you how to recognize the dangers of technology and how to protect yourself from the evil people out there who only care about one thing: your money and how to get it out of your bank account into their pockets.
We are running 50% off subscriptions all through December. If you can afford it, please consider subscribing. If money is tight, you can still help by restacking this article and sharing it with everyone you know, especially older relatives who need to understand how these scams work before they become the next victim.
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