Fact Check

Is $1 Donated for a Girl's Kidney Transplant Every Time Her Photo Is Shared on Social Media?

Nobody is paying for ailing children's organ transplants or life-saving surgeries based on how often a social media post is shared.

Published Sept. 4, 2018

 (rvlsoft / Shutterstock.com)
Image Via rvlsoft / Shutterstock.com
Claim:
A girl in need of a kidney transplant receives a $1 donation for that purpose every time her photo is shared on Facebook.

Many social media users have encountered a post showing a picture of a little girl in what looks to be a hospital bed, along with any one of several captions indicating she is awaiting a kidney transplant and will receive $1 every time her picture is shared via social media:

She gets a dollar for every pic that's shared on messenger it goes towards her kidney transplant.... you gotta share plz she is my neighbors kid

The child pictured here is not awaiting the transplant of a kidney (or any other organ). According to Click Paraná, she is (as of October 2017) a four-year-old Brazilian girl named Aninha who is undergoing chemotherapy for treatment of leukemia in Paraná (one of Brazil's 26 states).

This item is just another iteration of a long-running online hoax/scam entreating users to share posts and photographs under the false premise that doing so will help to secure an organ transplant or money for surgery needed by a desperately ill child.

Even if no money actually changes hands in connection with these posts, the sharing of them indirectly assists scammers by driving followers, shares, and likes to their social media pages, creating popular platforms from which they can launch other fraudulent schemes.

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994.