Episode 2: Sleuths

·24 min·2 clips

Investigators track Megan's mother to a Disney resort while she claims her daughter is fighting for life in hospital.

BBC presenter Jamie Bartlett introduces Joanna Ashcroft, who agreed to be interviewed under the pseudonym Sarah Smith, as a mother from Wigan whose son survived neuroblastoma after she raised £250,000 for specialist treatment in America. Joanna’s experience made her sensitive to the language of online medical fundraising, and when she encountered Believe in Magic founder Megan Bari’s third fundraising campaign in four years—this time for sepsis, infections, and supposed brain cancer—she found the vague medical details and inconsistent timelines suspicious. She created a fake Facebook account as Sarah Smith to ask questions without being publicly identified as a troll, and assembled a small group of fellow cancer parents, including a skilled hacker referred to as White Hat. The group—collectively called the sleuths—attempted to contact the Believe in Magic charity, trustees, and police, but were repeatedly dismissed. When updates from Megan’s mother Jean described Megan fighting for her life in a hospital, White Hat embedded tracking code in an email to Jean that revealed she had opened it from Disney’s Animal Kingdom Villas in Orlando. Joanna called the hotel and was briefly connected to Jean, who then denied being there. Megan subsequently sent Joanna a video filmed while hooked up to oxygen and a PICC line, claiming she was receiving hospital-grade care inside a Disney villa. The sleuths concluded this story was implausible. When Jean posted that Megan was too ill to fly and would need to return home on a low-altitude air ambulance, the sleuths checked Queen Mary 2 sailing schedules and found a departure matching the timeline. They pooled £1,000 to hire a private investigator to wait at Southampton docks. The episode is tightly paced, building the sense of an informal online investigation gaining momentum against an organization with thousands of sympathetic supporters.

As heard by us

A measured, unsettling look at how doubt grows when a fundraising story stops adding up.

The piece reads as a wary look at doubt taking shape, with parents who have lived through neuroblastoma starting to question Meg and Jean's fundraising claims.

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Why you'd press play

Forensic, patient listening when a fundraising story starts to wobble.

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