BBC uncovers the Ugandan scammers exploiting dogs to elicit donations from animal lovers
BBCA dog with rust-coloured fur lies at the side of a road. He looks peaceful, but as the TikTok video pans from his face to the rest of his body, severe injuries to his hind legs appear.
The dog is not resting. He is panting, presumably in pain.
Text on the 15-second clip tells viewers that this dog "got into an accident" and asks them "to save his life" by donating through an online link.
In the three weeks after the video was first posted on 8 January last year, this dog was featured in hundreds of other fundraising campaigns, by at least a dozen accounts.
A social media user from the UK named the dog Russet, which reflected the colour of his coat. Thousands of dollars were raised for his treatment. But he never got better.
BBC Africa Eye has discovered that this dog in Uganda was a prop in a scam that solicits donations for animals in distress, part of a hidden industry profiting from cruelty.
It is impossible to conclusively establish what caused Russet's injuries, but BBC World Service journalists managed to piece together parts of his story, which suggest he endured prolonged suffering, regardless of the cause.
The story connects a town in Uganda with animal lovers thousands of miles away. They are coaxed into parting with their money through emotional images, lies and the exploitation of Western stereotypes of Africa such as endemic poverty and widespread indifference towards animal welfare.
But it is dogs like Russet who pay the biggest price.
He was filmed in Mityana, a trading centre around 70km (43 miles) from Uganda's capital, Kampala.
The town has become infamous among online animal rescue activists around the world for one thing - sham dog rescue shelters.
Ugandan scammers have realised just how popular dogs are in Europe, North America and Australia, and how easily social media's obsession with dogs can be converted into cash.
"There are young men in the [Ugandan] countryside who are always looking for anything to do on the internet," Bart Kakooza, chairman of the Uganda Society for the Protection and Care of Animals, tells the BBC.
"On the other side, in the Western world, people are very passionate about animals. These young men realised they can make money if they can get a dog."
It is impossible to say how many social media accounts operate from Mityana. But collectively, they have flooded Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube with videos of pitiful-looking animals - mostly dogs and cats, but even rabbits – with commentary pleading for donations to shelter, feed and treat them.
A typical video involves a person showing some dogs in a makeshift structure coupled with messages like "our dogs are hungry" or "it's another day without food at the shelter" and "please help us".
The clips often exploit what content creators think will resonate with viewers' existing perceptions of Africa, depicting it as a place where food is scare and young dog lovers must fight against the odds to protect animals from societal hostility and neglect.
Data analysis by BBC Africa Eye suggests these videos have been effective in converting views into donations.
In the past five years, our research showed that more than $730,000 (£540,000) has been raised for animal shelters in Uganda by hundreds of fundraisers posted on the donation platform GoFundMe.
Nearly 40% of all the fundraisers analysed by the BBC were connected to Mityana.
In the town, the business of sham dog shelters is an open secret. Several residents tell the BBC it is easy to spot the con artists.
"When you see a young man driving a Subaru [a status symbol car in the area], you just know he is a scammer," says one.
Another says: "The scammers are the most respected here in Mityana".
But very few residents are willing to speak openly about specific shelter operations as they fear retaliation. The BBC decides to send an undercover team to Mityana.
The journalists pose as newcomers wanting to enter the business of online dog-shelter content.
They discover that some establishments in the area are rented out to multiple content creators.
The shelters charge an entrance fee to film with the owner's dogs. The videos are then posted on the scammer's social media accounts and affiliated online fundraisers, usually a GoFundMe or PayPal link.
This means the same physical shelter and the same dogs are used by several different accounts to solicit money.
The BBC team gains access to one of these shelters, run by a young man who introduces himself as Charles Lubajja.
At the shelter, the journalists find about 15 dogs kept in the same cage, lying in their own waste. Many appear severely underweight and lethargic.
Lubajja tells the undercover reporters that the shelter primarily exists to make money from social media viewers abroad under false pretences. He gives some advice on how to increase revenues, and shares some of the tricks, including:
- Pretending that a landowner has threatened the shelter with eviction and money is needed to relocate it
- Filming fake veterinary treatments, for example by placing a syringe in the dog's fur rather than administering a real injection
- Inflating the cost of dog food by more than 11 times.
"Once you receive the GoFundMe money, you use it to buy a car or build a house," Lubajja says while being secretly filmed.
"Once you get a white donor, don't treat them as a brother. You have to squeeze them [take their money]. Drain them."
But as fake operations like Lubajja's spread across the internet, a growing number of donors came to realise they had been deceived. Initiatives then sprang up to stop the scammers.
Campaigners' tactics include raising awareness among potential contributors, and naming and shaming the accounts believed to be the worst offenders.
Online activists also say that more than just neglect is taking place in Mityana's shelters, including deliberately harming the animals.
A campaign which gained ground due to its aggressive style is We Won't Be Scammed, which has an Instagram account with around 20,000 followers.
In the undercover filming, Lubajja himself mentions the campaign and describes it as the scammers' "biggest problem".
What Lubajja probably did not know is that the account is run by a 49-year-old woman who lives some 10,000km away in Yorkshire, in the north of England.
Nicola Baird, the founder of We Won't Be Scammed, is on the warpath.
"The scammers, I just have hatred for them," she tells the BBC. "They are the epitome of evil."
As with others in her network of 20 activists, Baird was once a victim. She sent money to a man in Mityana who said his dog needed surgery after a traffic accident.
When she received photos and videos of the dog's alleged surgery, Baird started to suspect something was wrong. Veterinary doctors she shared the images with confirmed that they looked more like abuse than veterinary care. "That's when I thought: 'Oh my goodness, I've enabled this abuse.'
"And that's when it became a real passion to stop the abuse because I felt like they were abusing [my dog] Sebi - they're abusing part of my family."
This experience shaped Baird's belief that animal injuries shown in social media videos - including burns, cuts and even missing limbs - have been deliberately inflicted, a view shared by other online activist groups monitoring accounts linked to Mityana.
Lubajja confirms to the undercover team that there have been instances where scammers have injured dogs on purpose.
"When they ran out of content, some people started cutting the dogs and asked for money," he says.
But he adds the escalation backfired when some donors started seeing through the abuse and warning others.
"[Scammers] no longer cut the dogs [because] they lost money when the white people realised."
Baird acknowledges that scammers' tactics have changed due to increased scrutiny, but maintains dogs are still being deliberately hurt and remain in danger.
"All that pain is just for a few donations," she says. "No animal should have to live like this."
We Won't Be Scammed and other online activists think that Russet, the dog who was filmed at the side of the road and featured in dozens of fundraising videos, had his legs deliberately broken.
During the undercover filming, Lubajja is shown a video of Russet and he identifies it as one of his dogs. When pressed for more details by the journalists, he says the dog had been involved in a traffic accident just outside the shelter.
But that may not have been the case.
After his initial social media appearance, Russet's image was posted on several different accounts, seemingly as he was passed from one scammer group to another.
Around three weeks later, a British social media user and donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, managed to negotiate Russet's release from the scammers to a veterinary clinic in Kampala.
Dr Isa Lutebemberwa went to Mityana to pick the dog up and took him to his clinic for treatment, which was funded by the UK donor.
In Lutebemberwa's opinion, the chances that Russet's injuries resulted from an accident were low. Describing an X-ray of Russet's lower body, he says: "If you look at these bones, all of them were broken almost in the same position.
"If you are interested in breaking a bone, it's the position you would go for, because it is the weakest."
Lutebemberwa operated on Russet. He survived the surgery but died a couple of days later.
"If you looked in his face, you would see that he had endured a lot of suffering," Lutebemberwa tells the BBC. "Given everything he had gone through, he did not deserve to die."
"Russet showed me the pain a dog which is out there can go through."
The BBC contacted Lubajja, who had told the undercover journalists he had been the owner of Russet, for comment on the findings of the investigation.
When sent images of Russet with the allegations, he said he did not recognise the dog and denied injuring animals. He acknowledged that content creators pay to film at his shelter.
Lutebemberwa and other animal activists in Uganda like Kakooza partially blame international donors for the suffering of dogs in Mityana's shelters, saying they often donate impulsively and without enough scrutiny.
"People who are donating money are causing the problem of animal cruelty here, because they keep on fuelling it, they are fanning the fire," says Kakooza.
Baird agrees that donations may inadvertently have caused harm: "I think the message that we have to take from Russet's abuse is the donations prolonged his agony. Had people not donated, Russet would not have suffered as long as he did."
Most animal activists, in Uganda and beyond, think that more awareness among social media users and potential donors would reduce the flow of donations to Mityana's shelters. This would dampen scammers' income and the appeal of the business among young people, and lead to fewer new dogs being captured for the scams.
However, few can point to a concrete solution for the dogs who are currently in the shelters.
Mityana police told the BBC that an operation in 2023 rescued 24 severely injured dogs kept in poor conditions at a sham shelter in town, and transferred them to Kampala for treatment.
Three suspects arrested in the operation were charged with cruelty against animals before being released. Their file was later closed, and they were given a warning.
Now, an international coalition of activists, including Kakooza, is trying to use private prosecutions to tackle the problem. One is already in the works.
"We hope this case will be a deterrent for many other people who wish to continue operating in this illegal trade," he tells the BBC.
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