Animal shelters are warning about a cruel twist on online fraud. Scammers create look-alike social media pages, lift photos and videos of sick or abused animals from real rescues, and post urgent pleas for money. These posts are designed to trigger an instant response from kind people—and to siphon donations away from legitimate organizations.
This sits inside a wider wave of “fake rescue” content: staged cruelty or stolen clips engineered to go viral and funnel cash. In 2024, the Social Media
