Mirnela Salihovic, director of Mostovi Spajanja (Connecting Bridges), a charitable association from Sarajevo, has been cooperating with organisations and people from Africa for the past year, collecting donations.
She also works with organisations in Uganda and explained that there are procedures to ensure the money reaches the right addresses.
She said she always demands “the name of the organisation, when it was registered, when they got their official seal, when they were founded”. Without that, Mostovi Spajanja will not work with them.
Salihovic said she had also received requests from questionable individuals and organisations and, due to past bad experiences, has not sent them money.
Most of the self-styled humanitarian activists who asked BIRN journalists or others for money wanted the payments made directly in their names.
Their social media accounts also include calls for donations to dig wells.
BIRN previously revealed how people and associations from Bosnia, with the support of local Salafi preachers, raised millions of euros to build wells and mosques in Africa. The investigation showed also that the money was collected in a non-transparent manner, and that although donors received photos of the supposedly built wells, some images clearly had been faked.
Pius Enywaru, an investigative journalist from Uganda, says he has recently come across similar cases, especially during Ramadan, on Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok. He says the fraudsters do not only target Muslims but anyone they think might donate money.
“They use well-known organisations that are reputable and trusted by people. They use well-known people from different countries. They use their pictures, their social networks. They also publish their pages, to appear more authentic,” Enywaru told BIRN.
“The police [in Uganda] do not pay much attention. [But] we have seen initiatives within our government that have warned people not to fall for scams, and some media organisations have also run campaigns,” he added.
Rasid Krupalija, from the Raskrinkavanje online fact-checking platform, which deals with verifying content on social networks, says most fake appeals for humanitarian aid are placed on Facebook and YouTube.
Meta, which owns Facebook, did not respond to BIRN’s question about the removal of such content, although it violates community rules, and so should be removed.
“Such content is rarely removed, with various excuses – that it does not violate community rules, is not harmful content and the like; sometimes, such excuses are accepted because it is very difficult to prove that something is a scam,” Krupalija said.
“It is very difficult to get in touch with Meta and explain to the people who work there that something is clearly a scam or that it is harmful content,” he added.
Images used to lure the gullible