Source: Justin Sullivan / Getty
A scam of the highest order was unleashed onto the unsuspecting after it was revealed the largest Black Lives Matter Facebook page was run by a white man in Australia. Ian Mackay was the mastermind behind the page that had twice as many users as the official BLM page, and even took donations under the banner of the organization.
CNN reports:
The page, titled simply “Black Lives Matter,” had almost 700,000 followers on Facebook, more than twice as many as the official Black Lives Matter page. It was tied to online fundraisers that brought in at least $100,000 that supposedly went to Black Lives Matter causes in the U.S. At least some of the money, however, was transferred to Australian bank accounts, CNN has learned.
Fundraising campaigns associated with the Facebook page were suspended by PayPal and Patreon after CNN contacted each of the companies for comment. Donorbox and Classy had already removed the campaigns.
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Only after almost a week of emails and calls between CNN and Facebook about this story did Facebook suspend the page, and then only because it had suspended a user account that administrated the page.
Mackay, who is an official with the National Union of Workers, a union that represents thousands, had his name consistently come up in searches of other websites liked to the page. In all, the operation yielded $100,000 before it was finally shut down.
BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors called for a removal of the page months ago, and it was actually taken down by an administrator of the page after CNN began investigating the links between Mackay and other Austrailian men using BLM’s name for the bogus fundraising scheme.
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Photo: Getty
