Another Twitter hoax fools unsuspecting donors, this time in Saudi Arabia

The story sounded compelling to many Saudis. A girl named Sara Ibrahim was suffering from leukemia and her family desperately needed help.

In fact, Al Arabiya News reported, it was a fake account using photos of an American cancer patient named Esme. But it wasn't exposed until after vacuuming up unsuspecting donors' money and attracting 74,000 followers.

It's triggered outrage over Twitter before the @sara_Ibrahim44 account was shut down.

UBC journalism professor Alfred Hermida offered tips in his 2014 book Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters on how to avoid being bilked by social-media scamsters.

He told the Straight last year that people should examine the length of time that a Twitter account has been in existence, who might be following the account, and who the account is following. In addition, Hermida advised examining tweets from the account in the past.

"So you can almost have a credibility scale that comes with a tweet after evaluating how long you've been on Twitter, how many friends they have, who they're connected to," Hermida said.

Some Internet scams have remarkably long shelf lives. The J.S. Dirr hoax stands out in this regard.

In this instance, a con artist claimed that his wife Dana died on her way to a Saskatchewan hospital when she was 35 weeks pregnant. But her baby was miraculously born—her 11th child. And her poor suffering widowed husband, J.S., was left to care for their five-year-old son with cancer.

Naturally, there was a Facebook account with everything documented.

It turned out to be the creation of an imaginative young woman in Ohio.