In Nijmegen, fake collectors are passing themselves off as Radboud University students. They are pretending to collect money to fund cancer research. Radboudumc is aware of the situation. ‘We would very much appreciate it if people reported this.’

Jantje Beton’s orange collection box or the Hartstichting’s red jackets; everyone’s familiar with door-to-door collectors. Those who wind up donating obviously want their hard-earned money to end up where it’s supposed to end up.

Last weekend, PhD candidate and Vox blogger Adriaan Duiveman found that this is not always the case. A fake collector came to his house last Sunday. ‘A little before six a guy in a red Radboud hoodie rang my doorbell. He wanted to ask me a few questions for a study by the university. He warned me that the questions concerned a sensitive topic: cancer. Then he asked me if I wanted to donate some money.’

Movember

Duiveman didn’t trust the little speech. ‘He claimed to be a first-year medical student and that he wouldn’t be performing the cancer research himself, but that students from a different minor would be’, Duiveman says. ‘That set off some warning bells, because why would a first-year student be involved with that kind of study?’

The boy explained that this was a crowdfunding campaign by Radboud University. The fact that Duiveman couldn’t actually find this campaign on the RU website was because the World Cancer Research Fund (Dutch: WKOF) was co-financing the endeavour, according to the ‘collector’. Duiveman: ‘That’s when I told him that I thought it was a very weird story and he’d better move along. I contacted the Radboudumc the next morning. They told me that Radboudumc employees never go door-to-door for collections.’

‘This makes people distrustful of collectors who do support a good cause’

The phony collector’s timing is no coincidence. In the spirit of Movember, the Radboud Oncology Fund is currently organising a major campaign to draw more attention to cancer research. The idea behind Movember is that men grow out their moustache all month to draw to attention to mental wellbeing, prostate cancer, and testicular cancer, among other things. The pun name is a portmanteau of the words ‘moustache’ and ‘November.’

Not the First Time

It’s not the first time that the Radboudumc has received reports of fake collectors pretending to be hospital employees. The past few years this has happened in several places in the Netherlands, including Apeldoorn and Wageningen. ‘We would very much appreciate it if people reported this’, says Radboudumc spokesperson Margie Alders. ‘Unfortunately, our options are limited, but at least we can take action when we we’re notified. We always ask people to file a report with the police and we’ll put a warning on our website.’

A Radboud University spokesperson is unaware of any earlier cases of collectors pretending to be students. ‘But obviously this is a very serious matter. It makes people distrustful of collectors who actually are committed to a good cause.