An influencer’s bad luck at Coachella turned into a blessing for a Fresno Uber driver.
After getting robbed at the music festival, Becca Moore met Raul Torres while riding with him to get a new phone. That’s when she learned Torres needed her help more than she needed his.
“I went to Coachella this weekend and I thought this guy was kinda hitting on me but then he just robbed me,” Moore says at the beginning of her three-minute video on TikTok.
If you’re one of her 800,000 followers on TikTok, you might recognize Moore for her deadpan storytelling about her dating life and other experiences.
While this video seems like another anecdote about an awkward mishap, the story is much more than that.
After her phone, wallet, and rental car keys were stolen at Coachella, the influencer said she was stranded. Her friend’s hotel called her an Uber to get to the Sprint store and that’s when she met Torres.
“A normal Uber driver takes you to a place and then drops you off. He insisted on coming in with me and making sure that I was going to have a ride after that.”
But Torres did even more than that.
“We went on an entire adventure from 10 a.m to 6 p.m, which should’ve been an entire day of work for him, and towards the end of the day is when I started realizing he actually needed more help than I did.”
Moore learned Torres had driven to Indio all the way from Fresno to earn some extra cash for his 18-year-old daughter.
“I said my birthday was June 16 and he was like, ‘Oh, my daughter got diagnosed with cancer on June 16.'”
That was back in 2020. Today, Mayra is a high school senior at Washington Union High in Easton, about six miles south of Fresno.
“And then he was like, ‘Yeah she’s going through chemo right now, she’s having a hard time. She can’t really stay awake and is losing a lot of weight’, and they were really worried about her.”
If that wasn’t enough, Moore said Torres was also caring for his dad.
“Sadly his dad passed away [Friday] morning,” she said.
His story inspired Moore to help. After posting the now-viral Tik Tok on Thursday, she made a GoFundMe account for her new friend. She raised more than $64,000 during the campaign’s first day.
“So usually I use my platform to talk about like, boys, my dating life and stupid things that now I really see are just surface level,” she said. “It means a lot that I can help him back.”
Moore said she was able to get her phone back with Torres’ help, who also drove her to the police station to file a report.
“So yeah, that man stole my phone, my keys, my credit cards,” she says at the end of her video. “You know what he gave me? Friendship with Raul, so it was worth it.”
This story originally reported by KTLA sister station KSEE/KGPE.