A website for a foundation that claimed to have been created in memory of Liverpool star Diogo Jota has been taken down after apparently raising nearly £50,000 in donations.
Jota, 28, and his brother André Silva, 26, lost their lives in a crash in Zamora near Spain’s north-west border with Portugal just after midnight on Thursday, July 3.
The Diogo Jota Foundation has been accepting donations from fans through its website diogojotafoundation.org, claiming to have raised £47,715 as of August 21.
But it is not affiliated with either Jota’s family or Liverpool FC, according to The Telegraph, with the family saying they knew nothing about the website.
When attempting to visit the website now, users are greeted with a blank grey home screen.
The Charity Commission has confirmed that the foundation has yet to submit a registration application.
Only a UK mobile number was working on Thursday, according to The Telegraph, while calls and texts went unanswered as did an email to the contact.
In addition to Liverpool, the foundation's website displayed logos for Unicef, Allianz, and the Portuguese Platform of Development NGOs.
However, at least three of these four organisations have stated they are not affiliated with the foundation.
Liverpool manager Arne Slot led the tributes to Jota as a “unique human being” as the footballing world reacted to the shocking news last month.
In a fresh tribute during Liverpool’s opening match of the season, Slot said he missed having Jota as part of his squad after their win over Bournemouth.
“Normally, when it was 2-2, I think you know which player I would have looked at at this moment in time,” he told Sky Sports at full-time.
“I would have loved to bring Diogo Jota in, but I couldn’t for terrible reasons.
“But now the fans and the players that were still there did what he did so many times in the past.”
The Liverpool and Portugal star and his brother, who played for Portuguese second-tier team Penafiel, were in a Lamborghini at the time of the crash.
The tragedy came just 11 days after Jota married his long-term partner Rute Cardoso.
The couple had been together since 2012 and have three children together. The Liverpool star proposed to Ms Cardosa in July 2022 in a picturesque lakeside setting.
After Jota’s death, Liverpool announced that the LFC Foundation has "committed to creating a grass-roots football programme in Diogo's name".
The club also added: "If supporters would like to honour Diogo by having 'Diogo J. 20' printed on the back of their shirt in official club stores or via our official online store, all profits will go to LFC Foundation."
The Diogo Jota Foundation website reportedly directs users to make donations via an external platform that seems to accept only cryptocurrency, stating that it "securely accepts USDT, ETH, and other crypto through NOWPayments."
But NOWPayments CEO Kate Lifshits claims they have not processed any payments to the foundation.
“I can confirm that no payments for this foundation have been processed through NOWPayments,” she said.
“As soon as we became aware of the alleged fraud, we stopped providing our services to the project immediately.”
In the UK, official advice on checking if a donation website or charity is legitimate comes primarily from the Charity Commission for England and Wales and organisations like Action Fraud and the Fundraising Regulator.
The Charity Commission says “all charities must be registered with the Charity Commission if they earn over £5,000 a year”.
