A GoFundMe raised $57,000 for a festival victim. The woman didn’t exist.

On April 26, 2025, a man drove an SUV into a crowd at the Lapu Lapu Day Festival in Vancouver. Eleven people were killed. Dozens more were injured. Within hours, fundraisers started appearing online.

Most of them were real. One was not.

“A loving mother who worked tirelessly”

Less than 48 hours after the attack, a GoFundMe appeared for a woman named Reyna Dela Peña. The page described her as “a loving mother and a great friend who worked tirelessly to support her two sons on her own.” It claimed she had died while walking toward a food truck during the festival.

The page had a photo. A name. A story. It had everything a donor would need to feel confident enough to give.

By April 29, $57,610 had been raised.

Something did not add up

Raquel Narraway is a realtor in Chilliwack, British Columbia. She has roughly 21,000 followers on Facebook. When she saw the Dela Peña fundraiser being shared across her feed, something felt off.

She could not say exactly what. The name was not showing up in news coverage of the victims. The story was vague. The photo looked like it had been pulled from someone’s personal social media.

So she posted. She asked her followers: does anyone recognize this woman?

Nobody did.

Then a comment appeared. A Filipino woman living in Nevada said those were her photos. She had never been to Vancouver. She had never heard of Reyna Dela Peña. Someone had stolen her images and built a fictional identity around them.

Narraway reported the campaign to GoFundMe and to police.

GoFundMe’s response

GoFundMe confirmed the fundraiser was fraudulent. The platform removed the page, refunded every donation, and permanently banned the organizer, who had used the first name “Diana.”

A GoFundMe spokesperson told reporters: “At no point did the organizer have access to the funds.”

That last part matters. GoFundMe holds donations in escrow until they verify the campaign. In this case, the system worked. But it worked because one person in Chilliwack decided to ask questions.

The red flags were there

Looking back, the warning signs were textbook.

No name match. The victim’s name did not appear in any news reports, hospital statements, or community posts about the festival attack.

No community recognition. In a tight-knit Filipino community grieving publicly, nobody knew who Reyna Dela Peña was. That alone should have been a signal.

Stock-style photo. The image looked personal but was not connected to any real person in the area. Reverse image searches can catch this in seconds.

Vague details. The page described a generic scenario without specific details that matched eyewitness accounts or police reports.

The Canada Revenue Agency maintains a searchable database of every registered charity in the country. It will not catch a fake GoFundMe, but it will help verify whether a charitable organization is legitimate before you give. For personal fundraisers, the best tool is still the simplest one: ask around.

What this tells us about giving in a crisis

After every tragedy, there is a window. It lasts about 72 hours. During that window, people give fast, give emotionally, and give without checking. Scammers know this. They build pages that look right, tell stories that feel right, and collect money before anyone has time to think.

The Lapu Lapu fundraiser was caught because of community vigilance, not because of technology. Raquel Narraway did what no algorithm could do fast enough. She asked her neighbours.

That is the tension at the heart of online giving. The same speed that lets a family raise $200,000 in a week for a real emergency also lets a stranger raise $57,000 for a person who never existed.

Platforms are getting better. GoFundMe’s escrow system prevented the money from reaching the scammer. Canadian platforms like Tiing build verification into the process from the start, tying campaigns to real identities and processing payments through secured channels in CAD.

But platforms alone are not enough. The best fraud detection system in Canada right now is still a person with a Facebook account and a gut feeling that something does not add up.

Raquel Narraway proved that.