Instead of Just Bitching About It

DO SOMETHING.

Back­ing up — on 7/4, city_glitter post­ed a mes­sage claim­ing that her cat had been set on fire by per­sons unknown, ask­ing for help to pay the vet bill.

The first I’d ever known of her was a mes­sage in word­weaver­lynn’s jour­nal, point­ing peo­ple to that entry. She and many oth­ers got the word out in a big way, which led to over $12k in donations. 

To a con artist.

word­weaver­lynn and the oth­ers who spread word of the ini­tial post are blame­less in their desire to help. There were no obvi­ous signs that this was a hoax, and a cou­ple of peo­ple who were vocif­er­ous­ly sup­port­ive of the perp have damned good reputations—reputations that the liar was more than will­ing to use in order to com­mit her crime. None of those peo­ple did any­thing wrong.

city_glitter did. She com­mit­ted fraud.

She also vio­lat­ed LJ’s TOS and still has a work­ing account, which is a less­er yet not insignif­i­cant issue.

I’m see­ing a LOT of out­rage about the sit­u­a­tion, but I’ve yet to run across any­one say­ing, “I donat­ed, so I filed a fraud com­plaint with the police today” or even a state­ment that they’ve per­son­al­ly made an LJ abuse report.

There are pro­ce­dures in place to deal with thieves. Use them. Encour­age those who donat­ed to use them.

The same goes for peo­ple who abuse their LJ accounts—you can get her account shut down. (I did­n’t get involved, so I don’t think I have grounds to file com­plaints with LJ. They’re fun­ny that way.)