Was touching story of homeless ‘Charlie Binbags’ a fundraising scam?

Charity says Charlie Hennessy probably
never really existed

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“I’m not stupid or on drugs or violent or dishonest or crazy or
greedy or diseased or drunk or likely to kill you,” he
wrote. “I’m a nice guy. I just don’t currently have a home.
That’s all it is.”

The tweet was liked around 29,000 times and messages were sent
to Hennessy, who claimed to have made his way from Croydon to
Brighton.

“People have helped me in ways I never imagined,” he tweeted.
“Food, money, love, support. Tomorrow I have a job interview.”

In the following days, Hennessy was “inundated with offers of
help, including from Streets Kitchen, a group that runs outreach
services and food kitchens for homeless people in the UK and
Ireland”, The Times reports.

Amid mounting media requests, Streets Kitchen felt under pressure to vouch for him,
and began its own investigation – which unearthed some troubling
inconsistencies in his claims.

In a post detailing its “concerns”, the charity said it had
found Hennessy somewhere to eat, but he declined, and then
offered to pay for his train ticket to Brighton, but he refused to
meet anyone to collect it and said he would walk to Brighton
instead (a 14-hour journey).

“He has refused all direct offers of help from us (a
well-established and trusted grass-roots organisation) and others,
whilst accepting a lot of financial assistance from
strangers,” the statement said.

The charity discovered that he was accepting donations through
three different PayPal accounts, while the picture originally used
in his Twitter and PayPal profile was actually a screengrab of
another Twitter user based in Florida.

Street Kitchen said it had discovered and reported several
suspicious Twitter accounts that appear to be so-called “sock
puppets” connected to @CharlieBinbags, “used to support and lend
credibility to his own”.

The charity has shared its findings with ActionFraud, the UK
fraud reporting service, and says it wants to “lay out the
things that set alarm bells ringing for us”.

In an article for Vice News, journalist Bob Trafford describes
how he spoke to Hennessy via private messages on Twitter before the
account was deleted. After asking “Charlie to comment for a final
time… he re-stated his story of being homeless and having his
life transformed by the kindness of strangers”, Trafford says.

“You can’t disprove the truth,” Hennessy reportedly told
him.

Streets Kitchen’s Thomas Wenn told Trafford that he was
surprised at “how rife the internet is with fake fundraisers”.

“The characters created in these fundraising scams piggyback off
the helpless, lonely and vulnerable. They seek out the best in
people, for their own gain,” Wenn said. “Do your research before
sending money online, and remember, sometimes, your time is more
valuable than your money.”