The 37-year-old founder of an NGO in Northern Greece had set up an “industry” that exploited human suffering; he raised hundreds of thousands of euros from fundraisers for children with serious health problems, but the money from these charitable efforts ended up in his own pocket.
One of his victims was 17-year-old Giorgos from Naoussa, Imathia, who was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2018. He was a child from a large family facing serious financial difficulties, as his parents had lost their jobs.
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And while the child was fighting for his life in hospitals in Thessaloniki, the 37-year-old contacted the child’s parents and offered to help through the NGO he had founded.
He initially approached the child’s father, promising to raise funds so the child could go abroad and continue his treatment there.
Time passed, however, and the funds raised for George were minimal. At some point, his father contacted the 37-year-old to update him on the fundraiser, as the bank account that had been opened was in the name of the NGO and not the family.
There were only 5,000 euros in that account, even as the family was receiving thousands of messages every day from people who had donated to help 17-year-old George.
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“I’m hearing now about 150,000, but the total amount I saw at the time was 5,000 euros that they gave me. And in the end, another 2,000 euros for the child’s grave. They contacted me because they’d heard about Giorgos’s case, and he told me, ‘We want to help you financially.’ At the time, I wanted to raise money so we could go abroad. In the post we made about Giorgakis, they included their own bank account number, not ours. And they listed three accounts. They’d been raising money for a while, but when I asked him how much had been raised, he told me 5,000 euros,” the father of the 17-year-old—who passed away in July 2021 after a long battle with the disease—told protothema.gr.
The boy’s parents realized something was wrong when they saw people complaining in the comments section under the fundraiser post.
“After we posted about George, we knew money was coming in constantly. People were complaining and saying to give it to us. When I asked him again about the money, he replied in a tone that suggested, ‘If I want to, I’ll stop it right now. I don’t need the money.” He gave me a total of 7,000, and when we posted about it on our own, we raised more than that from the public within 15 days. And in the end, when I spoke with someone and told her we didn’t have money for the memorial, she gave me 2,000 to cover it,” he says, even as the authorities’ investigation revealed that the amount raised by the NGO for 17-year-old Giorgos was over 136,000 euros.
Today, Giorgos’s father’s only request is that the money lost in the fraud be recovered and used for the purpose for which people donated it: for children who need it to survive…
Source: Proto Thema
