Trolls use photo of boy who died of cancer to set up fake fundraising page

The 'cruel' fraudsters used a photo of nine-year-old Bailey Cooper to try and scam donations to host a final birthday party for a boy who didn't exist.

A mum slammed ‘cruel’ trolls after a photo of her nine-year-old son who died of cancer was used to create a fake fundraising page.

Bailey Cooper passed away in December 2017 following a 15-month battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

His family, from Patchway in Bristol, were left shaken when they discovered a sham Instagram profile and GoFundMe page for a boy called ‘Declan’ – using a photo of Bailey.

They had amassed 45,000 followers before they were taken down and featured fake posts pretending to be from England captain Harry Kane.

Fraudsters claimed funds were being raised to organise a final birthday party for the fictitious child so he could meet his ‘favourite footballer’.

Rachel told the BBC: ‘My initial thought was “this is a joke – this isn’t real”. I was in shock that it had even happened.

‘I know it is not a nice world we live in nowadays but I didn’t think it was this cruel.

‘It petrifies me and what makes it worse is that his little brother has seen it. He is really struggling.

‘It has put me off social media. I’m frightened about what will be taken from us.’

A GoFundMe spokeswoman said: ‘This campaign was proactively removed by our team within minutes of being posted.

‘At no point would the person who posted it have been able to get access to any donations.’

A spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said: ‘We understand the distress this has caused the Cooper family.

‘Impersonation accounts are against our Community Guidelines and will be removed once we are made aware of them.

‘If someone believes they have spotted a fraudulent account, we’d encourage that they report it using our online form or in-app tools.’

Bailey first became ill in the summer of 2016 and was diagnosed with stage three non-Hodgkin lymphoma following a series of tests.

Doctors were initially optimistic that he would recover and he went into remission in early 2017.

However, he relapsed on a family holiday that Easter and deteriorated over the following months until his death over Christmas.

Hundreds of people turned out to pay their respects at Bailey’s funeral including then Bristol Rovers FC captain Tom Lockyer, who struck up a friendship with the young football fan.

Speaking at the time, Bailey’s dad Lee said: ‘Bailey smiled through it all. He pulled funny faces and made people laugh, even though he was in so much pain.’