The Child Cancer Scam: 5. The agency

0:04It's a hot morning here in Tel Aviv and we are headed to the address listed on the Chancellor Tikfa website. I want to see if there's an office there and if there's someone we can finally speak to. The address is also the one listed for Chancellor Tikva on the official charity database. Israeli journalist Tom Tew Weiswolder is with me. So we're going to a city called Bechemesh, which is a religious city. We're going to a neighbourhood that is populated with Orthodox Jews. and that means we need to come in modest clothing. So I brought for you some scarves so you can cover your shoulders. Cover my arms and my chest.

0:48We're going to try not to draw too much attention to ourselves because we want to be respectful and we want to try to get to the charity's offices. Bet Shemesh has a large Orthodox Jewish, or Haredi, community. It's about 30 kilometres west of Jerusalem. They have the traditional dress for the men with the top hat and the jacket. Even when it's very hot outside, they wear it. And for the women, they need to be modest, which means that the skirt has to be after the knee line and the shirt has to be covering the shoulders. They are a tight-knit community, with their own schools, charity networks and neighbourhood institutions.

1:30Things that's going on inside the community, a lot of times doesn't go out to the general public. So we are just arriving at the address on the Chancellor Tikva website and this seems like a residential neighbourhood. There are lots of mid-rise apartment blocks and I've seen lots of families, men and children in traditional Haredi outfits just walking around. and it's fairly quiet. OK, so the address is supposed to be right here.

2:11We find these cream-coloured apartment blocks with glass balconies. First, we check the mailboxes at the entrance of the one that matches the address. So none of these mailboxes say Chancellor Tickford? No, and none of the last names are similar to the members registered in Chancellor Tikva.

2:34But after a few minutes, a man with a long beard, wearing a white shirt and glasses, comes out of the building. We ask him if he's heard of Chancellor Tikva. Chancellor Tikva? A charity? You've not heard of it?

2:53He tells us there are some porter cabins around the side of the building with the same address. So we go and look there. But there's nothing here that spells office or charity or anything else. There's another man coming out, so should we walk out? Out of the corner of my eye, I notice another man who starts following us. He asks us if we have permission to record. He tells us this is private land. Tom tells him it's not. Before we know it, more men join them. I count four and they're all looking at us. It feels like they've come out of nowhere. One of them is on the phone. He's got his hand on his hip and stares at us intently as he makes a call.

3:47Things are starting to get tense. Everything is fine. Now he threatened us. Now he said, if you don't want us to be a mess, you're going to go. It's clear they don't want us here.

4:03So we basically just had to flee the Chancellor Tikva address. He said that if we don't leave in 10 minutes, he's going to make a mess. And he was saying that while he was on the phone, like seemingly calling for backup. And there was a lot of people grouping around us and it became kind of scary. Yeah, we were basically surrounded at one point. And then another man was saying, this is private property, step back. And they clearly wanted us to leave. At some point, I also got scared. Like when he said, leave in 10 minutes or it's going to be a mess. I also felt like we need to go from there. Because this is not a safe environment for us.

4:45This is World of Secrets. Season 10. The Child Cancer Scam.

4:54A BBC World Service investigation. I'm Simi Joloosho. Episode 5. The Agency.

5:13So I can't find an office for Chancellor Tikva. I can't get through to anyone on the phone. But there is a marketing agency here in Jerusalem that appears to have done work for them.

5:30In the corner of this Chancellor Tecfah video is a flame-shaped logo. It belongs to Turbo Digital. When you click on it, it takes you through to their YouTube channel, where there's video after video of sick people.

5:52They all follow a familiar script. Heartfelt, tearful stories to emotive music. On its website, Turbo Digital says it does what it loves.

6:09People today are incredibly smart, including donors. They know when something's real. If it's authentic, they'll give. If it feels off, they won't. This is Turbo Digital's director and owner, Shulamit Sigal Zlotsky, or Shuli. She's speaking on the Clicker Billy podcast in 2019 about her work. The host asks her how she conveys the feeling that this is a genuine campaign and not some kind of scam.

6:44I direct the videos myself. I sit with the person, look them in the eye, and sometimes when people see heartbreaking videos, they don't realize how much more heartbreaking the raw footage behind the scenes was. When I understand the case deeply, it becomes easier for me to make sure the text reflects what's needed. She knows, she says, how to get into people's hearts and into their pockets. You see a parent, like you, who loves their child. Each of us connects from our own place. Maybe it reminds you of your younger brother, your mother, or someone else you love. There's so much more that unites us than divides us.

7:26Crowdfunding proves that over and over again, which I find amazing. On the Turbo Digital website, in the Active Campaign section, I find a carousel of fundraisers, including a Chancellor Tikva one for a little boy called Hector.

7:51On the actual campaign page, it says it has raised nearly a million dollars. But when we contact Hector's family in Mexico, just like Anna, Khalil and Victoria, they say they have not received any of the campaign's donations. Tragically, their little boy Hector has since died.

8:17We've spent hours looking at the various Chancellor Tikva campaigns and websites and my teammate Jack Goodman has managed to make some more connections. So Chancellor Tikva in English is Chancellor Hope And there's a web domain that we've seen linked to quite a few of the Chancellor Tickfa campaign pages. The domain is chanceforhope.org.il. So you can look up domains to see who registered them. And I looked up this domain to see who registered it and its shoe limits. It's got her full name, her address, her phone number, email address, it's all there. And there's more. That URL has actually come up before.

9:08I'm going to take you to Khalil's campaign page, which is still online, which is on a crowdfunding platform. You scroll down the page a bit and then there are four links inviting you to donate in dollars, euros, pounds and shekels. And when you hover the mouse over the links, you can see that it leads to a web page with that Chance for Hope URL. So you're saying there's a direct link between the domain registered by Shulamit and Khalil's campaign? Yeah. Shulamit Segal-Zlotsky, or Shuli, is in her late 20s, and she's had a fair amount of press coverage in Israel. In an article in the Jerusalem Post, she talks about proudly leading a team of mostly Haredi women, like herself.

10:08They are the real superwoman, she's quoted as saying. And in another article, she boasts about how easy it is to make money. 300 ,000 shekels a day in one campaign. Sometimes I go to bed, wake up in the morning, and the campaign has raised another quarter of a million online. It's hard to sleep like that. It isn't all good news, though. Shulamit also features in a TV investigation by Israel's Channel 11 from 2023, where she's accused of using unethical practices when making fundraising videos.

10:49In this footage that looks like it was shot on a mobile phone, Shulamit is saying to her mother, through an interpreter, that she wants to film her child alone. Another mother, called Oksana, also describes her experience in the documentary.

11:13When they came to film the video with Olesa, Shuli was there with an interpreter. They asked that I say that Olesa was dying and that we desperately needed money. They said cry. Then they told me, not like that, you need to cry louder. I spoke to two other mothers who say they had similar experiences with Shulamit in Israel. One, I'll call Natalia because she doesn't want me to use her real name. In 2022, she travelled to Israel from Ukraine to get a bone marrow transplant for her one-year-old daughter. But it was expensive and she found her money quickly running out. That's when she says she was approached by someone offering help.

11:57It all started when I got a call from a man who said he was the director of some foundation. He said that he would really like to help me and my daughter. He offered to film a video that we would post on some social platforms to raise some money. Natalia felt they did not have a choice. That was probably my last hope. We needed funds urgently. I hoped it would really help us and we would be able to raise money quickly and pay the clinic. The man wasn't working with Chancellor Tikva or Wars of Hope. He said he was representing a different organisation. A group came, two women and one man. They put a bit of makeup on me, put my girl in a bed and told me to tell our story in a way that will make people cry.

12:47They told me to say that she was almost dying. They said I should say things like, the child is feeling very unwell, she's dying and money is needed urgently. Well, it was not a very pleasant experience. The whole situation wasn't normal. One of the women directing her, she says, was Shulamit. She was there and she was the one who told me to say these horrible things. By the time the filming had ended and they had packed up and left, how did you feel? I just sat and cried because I didn't understand what kind of madness was going on.

13:33Three months later, Natalia says she was contacted by Shulamit, who shared a link to the campaign. Natalia was amazed to watch the donations pour in, eventually reaching over$66 ,000. But Natalia says she didn't receive any of it. And when she asked, she said she was told the funds had all been used for the production costs, the organisation's overheads, and advertising. It's so similar to the experiences of the other families we've heard from, whose campaigns were run by Chancellor Tikva and Walls of Hope. I really want to hear what Shulamit has to say about all this. But after days of back and forth, she declines to talk to me.

14:22Instead, she asks me to send questions over email. A few days later, we receive a written reply. Turbo Digital said they have never instructed that any parent cause suffering to their child and that every production is done with sensitivity, gentleness and full approval by the family. In terms of where the campaign money that never reached the families has gone, Shulamit insists Turbo Digital has nothing to do with it. If the goal is a fundraiser campaign, the donations are directed straight to the association's bank account. We never have had access to a client's account and we have no way to examine the association's manner of funds management.

15:07She didn't deny working with Chancellor Tikva, but said, We didn't shoot their ads and didn't stage them. We received ready materials for editing and we did that. She says they cut ties with them in mid-2023 and that they registered the web domain for them as a technical service. It was needed to verify emails. This is a service the association requests for the reason presented by them. Need of professional help in verifying a domain. And on why Hector's campaign was still on her website, she said. Due to lack of attention during building the new site, this campaign was not removed from active campaigns to the finished campaign zone.

15:50Thanks to your notice, we have removed the old version completely and soon will air the new site. I did notice that after we asked her about it, Turbo Digital's homepage changed with a message saying its site is under construction. Shulamit didn't tell us who at Chancellor Tikva she did work with, but said she doesn't know Erez Hadari.

16:23In Israel, the body that oversees the registration of charities is the Israeli Corporation's Authority. It's part of the Ministry of Justice. The current spokesperson said no one was available to talk, but the former head agreed to meet me. Hi, I'm El Globus. I'm a lawyer, an Israeli lawyer. I was the head of the Israeli authority of a company who really is dealing with several fields. One of them is NGO. Have you ever heard of cases where charities exploit families by offering to crowdfund for them and then they never give them the money? We heard about it in several NGOs. There is a sick person and he's not getting money at all or not getting some of the money and actually the NGO is using the money for other purposes, which is illegal, actually.

17:20It's illegal. And what did you do about it when you heard about these cases? We have several stages. First, we can tell all the public this NGO is not acting properly and we can do even more than that, to shut them down completely. I tell him what I found out about Chancellor Tikva. He says he can't comment on specific cases, but... If they're cheating, it's totally wrong. It's even criminal. If they're taking their money, the money that they raise to a sick child, to their pocket, it's like stealing money. It's really wrong. I explained that we couldn't find any sign of their office at their registered address.

18:02What do they do in cases like that? We don't go regularly to check whether that's the office of that NGO or charity. If we have any information that that address is wrong, we can tell them, listen, something is wrong. Write a correct address. And if not, we'll do one or two or three. In the end, not because of that, but because of other things, which are more serious, we might even stop the operation of this NGO. The problem is that an NGO can operate and even if we shut it down, then it can open another NGO and start over again. If someone has created a charity, the charity is seen as fraudulent, they shut it down.

18:54That same person can create another charity. If I'm telling you now that this is a problem that lots of families have been affected by this. Does this not show that the Ministry of Justice is just not doing enough to prevent this from happening? Yeah, but I don't think you can stop it with 100%. For instance, if somebody is stealing something from your house, it doesn't mean that the police is not okay or the Ministry of Justice is not acting okay. Feasts will always be. And still, even in that field, Fists are always trying to find different ways or the same way to steal money or to operate illegally.

19:38After I'd left the country, the Israeli Corporations Authority did send us a statement. They said that if someone is found breaking the law, they will be barred from working in the sector again. The network we've uncovered does seem to keep reinventing itself, shape-shifting, name-changing. In Ukraine, Oleg spoke about there being different organisations each time. I hate to put it this way, but they work kind of like a conveyor belt.

20:10So far, we have found Walls of Hope, Chance for Hope, which is Chancellor Tikva, The Little Angels, Saint Teresa, and now a new one called Saint Raphael, all linked. One of the archived Saint Raphael campaigns has Chancellor Tikva's American phone number on it. And over the last few months, more campaign videos have been coming out of Ukraine under Saint Raphael. Jack's been monitoring them. The first one we saw was videos of a little girl crying in a, what looked like a hospital room. But the room she was in looked really familiar. There was a kind of a wooden cabinet. And it's because that cabinet looks so similar to the room where Victoria was filmed.

20:59In Angleholm. Angleholm Clinic in Chinibsie. There's been two other campaign videos since then. and I suspect that they were also filmed there just because of the look of the room. Are you talking about the wood panelling? The wood panelling, some of the cabinets. Some of the bed frames as well. Exactly. When you've been looking at these videos for so long, something was instantly recognisable. So we called one of these children's parents and she told us a very familiar story. She ended up filming in Angleholm, which does seem to be a bit of a hub for this operation. She told us that she only received$2 ,000 on the day of filming, similar to Olena.

21:48And the person this mother says helped organise it? Tatiana. So the mother told us that Tatiana had got them involved in this filming and Oleg was also there on the day of filming. Oleg, who filmed Victoria's campaign? Yeah. When our Ukrainian producer calls the clinic to confirm what Tetiana Haliavka's role is there, we are told she manages Angle Homes, advertising and communications. We put all our findings to them and got this response. The information you communicated has caused us considerable concern. The clinic has never participated in nor supported any fundraising initiatives organized by any organization.

22:37The clinic did not receive and did not issue any letter, request, permission or approval for photography or video recording on its premises for the purposes to which you refer. The clinic formally declares that any statements, assumptions or insinuations concerning the clinic's involvement in foreign fundraising activities or the treatment of children with oncological diseases are entirely unfounded and categorically false. And when it comes to Tatiana Haliavka, they said, In view of the information you provided, the clinic has made the decision to terminate her employment. You may address any personal questions directly to Miss Haliavka.

23:23Well, it's time to call her directly and ask her about her involvement.

23:31There's a number for her. That's on Telegram. Says she's online.

23:46So Tatiana is online, I can see she's active on Telegram right now and she's just ignored my call. And I've tried her a couple of times on this number, on another number and yeah she's just not responding so I'm going to send her a text message now and let's see if she gets back to me. She didn't reply and doesn't respond to our email spelling out all the allegations against her, including how she recruited families and used her clinic as cover for filming.