Beware! Don't trust everybody on Twitter

They take advantage of your kindness, your passions and your weaknesses.

The news of this week in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and many weeks to come, is Twitter account that pulled off a scam on all the GCC people for over a year now. All what the scammer needed was a Twitter account named after a girl, "Sarah Ibrahim," and a stolen photo of an American girl as her avatar and a story about a Saudi girl who is suffering from cancer and courageously battling it somewhere in the United States. The avatar photo and the subsequent photos chronicling the girl's journey on hospital's beds are all real, because the girl is a true young American girl battling cancer, it just happens that her name is not Sarah, it is Esme, 10, diagnosed with osteosarcoma since December 2013. A couple of tweets and photos in a hashtag depicting the girl praying, showing a lot of faith and hope, and asking her followers to remember her in their prayers, were all what needed for the account to get noticed and get popular. In no time, politicians, celebrities, and social media stars from Saudi Arabia and the Arab world started showing interest in the story and retweeting the sweet girl photos, The Arab News reports. Interestingly, charity Twitter accounts in the Kingdom started to adopt the girl's case, one of them even named her "The Saudi Survival Ambassador." It did not take long for Team Sarah to materialize, with people shaving their heads and sharing their photos with the poor girl as a way of showing support. It went a bit further and went to Makkah to perform Umrah on her behalf! Craziness did not stop there; a TV station did interview the girl! Of course they did not show her face, just reached her through Twitter, exchanged numbers, and broadcast her voice through live TV. Of course, a perfect scam should involve money, and that happened away from the public timeline. On the private chats and DMs, the account of Sarah was sharing her bank account with those interested in sending her some cash to help in the treatment expenses. A perfect scam till two other accounts started exposing the scandal. There is a lot of missing information at the moment, the story is still unfolding; who is behind this account, and how it was exposed are still open questions that need to be investigated. However, what we can say for sure is that we are extremely gullible when it comes to emotionally charged stories. We are willing to pay money and be involved mentally and emotionally in something we did not spend the slightest effort to verify. It is good to see that people still have good wells and hearts, it is just disheartening to witness their laziness, unwillingness to search for the truth, and submission to public pressure. It is a lesson we all learned, the hard way.