Former Ardsley Resident Faked Cancer To Get Donations: AG

ARDSLEY, NY — A former Ardsley resident, now living in Orlando, FL, was charged with fraud for faking a terminal illness and getting people to contribute to a GoFundMe account to the tune of more than $50,000. Joon H. Kim, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Vedoutie Hoobraj, 38, also known as Shivonie Deokaran, allegedly engage in a scheme to defraud donors through false representations that she had been diagnosed with terminal leukemia and needed money to pay for her treatments.

Hoobraj was arrested in Orlando Friday morning and was presented in court in the Middle District of Florida.

“Vedoutie Hoobraj allegedly concocted an elaborate story about having cancer when she did not, using GoFundMe pages and accepting money raised by a local high school, all supposedly to fund her medical care,” Kim said.

“Hoobraj even falsified medical records for donors to conceal the fraud,” he said.

Hoobraj has been charged with one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison term of 20 years.

A spokesman for GoFundMe said anyone who donated to Hoobraj will get a refund.

“First, our platform is backed by the GoFundMe Guarantee, which means that in the rare case that GoFundMe, law enforcement or a user finds campaigns are misused, donors are fully protected and will get their money back,” said spokesman Bobby Whithorne.

“Additionally, it’s important to remember that misuse is extremely rare on our platform. Campaigns with misuse make up less than one tenth of one percent of all campaigns. With that said, there are unfortunate and rare instances where people create campaigns with the intention to take advantage of others’ generosity. In the small handful of cases where misuse occurs, GoFundMe takes action to resolve the issue. The user has been banned and GoFundMe will offer refunds to all GoFundMe donors.”

According to the allegations in the complaint unsealed in federal court:

Beginning in at least about October 2014 and through at least March 2016, in Westchester County, New York, and elsewhere, HOOBRAJ engaged in a scheme that solicited donations through fraudulent representations that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and needed money for living and medical expenses.

HOOBRAJ obtained donations from donors through checks and fund transfers to two GoFundMe fundraising websites set up in October 2014 and August 2015 on her behalf. The GoFundMe websites represented, among other things, that HOOBRAJ was diagnosed with leukemia and given 18 months to live, and that HOOBRAJ’s family was suffering financial burdens from her chemotherapy treatments and other medical and living expenses. HOOBRAJ publicized the sites in online posts and emails, among other means.

As alleged in the Complaint, HOOBRAJ received in excess of $50,000 in donations from over 300 individuals in Ardsley, New York, and elsewhere based on these and other related misrepresentations. Between October 2014 and December 2015, HOOBRAJ transferred a total of approximately $32,600 from an Ohio bank account operated by GoFundMe’s payment processor vendor to HOOBRAJ’s bank account in New York. In or about November 2015, HOOBRAJ deposited two donation checks totaling $16,274 from the Student Activity Fund of Ardsley High School, in Ardsley, New York, representing proceeds of a fundraising event organized in part by a donor (“Individual-1”). HOOBRAJ also deposited other donation checks.

In an interview with a detective at the Ardsley Police Department on or about January 20, 2016, HOOBRAJ stated, among other things, that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer by a specified doctor at Sloan Kettering Medical Center who died in an earthquake in Nepal in April 2015, was currently being treated by another specified doctor, and had also gone to “Mount Kisco Medical Center” and “Bronx Lebanon Hospital” for treatments. However, as alleged in the Complaint, HOOBRAJ had never been treated by these doctors and medical centers.

In or about March 2016, in an effort to prove that she had cancer, HOOBRAJ used the online messaging platform Facebook Messenger to send Individual-1 a screenshot of HOOBRAJ’s purported laboratory tests from a January 29, 2016, examination at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, New York (“Jacobi”). The results presented by HOOBRAJ appeared to indicate that her hemoglobin, platelet counts, and red blood cell counts were all outside the stated normal ranges. Records obtained from Jacobi as part of this investigation, however, revealed that the document sent by HOOBRAJ was a forgery, and that the actual medical record previously provided by Jacobi to HOOBRAJ stated, “Your labs turned out to show no abnormalities.”

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