Family of Irish woman seriously injured in Italy left furious over copycat GoFundMe scam

The copycat GoFundMe page was set up to scam people into donations

The family had originally set up a page on the popular fund-raising site after 22-year-old, Hannah Leonard, was hit by a car at high speed while she was out for a run in Sicily.

The incident happened over four weeks ago as she was training for the Dublin Marathon.

It is understood that she was struck by the car as she crossed the road at a zebra crossing, resulting in her being thrown nearly give meters into the air.

She suffered a serious brain injury and is in a critical but stable condition in hospital. It is understood that she won’t be able to return to Ireland until she has undergone an operation.

Her family travelled to Sicily to be by her side and set up the GoFundMe page as a way to help with her medical bills.

Speaking to Newstalk today, Hannah’s Dad, Kevin said they were furious to discover a copycat version of their page on the GoFundMe platform.

“I went on to GoFundMe to search her page and two popped up. One was the one that my brother had set up and then one was set up by somebody somewhere in the United States - a carbon copy of the page that we had set up," he said.

“Now, thankfully, they hadn’t gotten any donations onto the page at that stage, so GoFundMe were very quick to react and take it down.”

Mr. Leonard went on to say that “the only difference was that my brother’s name and my name are both on the GoFundMe that was set up for Hannah.

“They’d taken her picture and copied all of the wording - it looked exactly the same as the page we had set up.”

Hannah’s dad said at a time when they were going through so much as a family, they found the discovery of the page to be “overwhelming”.

“The main reason the page was set up initially is that we had all these family and friends wanting to help and like, there isn’t much anybody can do at this stage, but they all want to help somehow.

“So, we set up the GoFundMe because we know we’re going to have costs and we don’t know what those costs are going to be.

“Even getting her home, we’re going to have to hire an air ambulance to get her home…”

Kevin then said that there have been so many generous people - family, friends and strangers - who have been donating to their page which he said is “amazing”.

He spoke of the day he received the devastating news, and said: “When we got the call, we really didn't know how severe the accident was, we just knew that they had to do emergency surgery.

“Hannah's such a big part of our lives, she's one of our best friends - to get a call like that… It's just devastating.”

They’re currently up to €153,397 on the page and it’s continuing to grow with people sharing what they can to help out.

If you would like to donate to the page you can do so by clicking here.

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