On these go-fund me things. How much do the people really get?
GoFundMe withholds 2.9% of each donation, plus a transaction fee of (in the UK) 25 pence.
(That’s for individuals. There is a lower rate for charities.)
I suspect there is a wide array of Go-fund me appeals.
My son did a couple to fund an RP game he was developing, and made his relatively modest goals (approx $6k IIRC) quite quickly.
At the time, GFM impressed me as a decent way to support creative efforts. Personally, I’m a little more dubious of the “woe is me” sort of appeals.
For those, I’m more inclined to back Kickstarter things, precisely because GFM’s association with social appeals has soured me on it.
Oh drat - I think I conflated the 2.
Yeah, they’re quite different in terms of purpose. GoFundMe is for collecting donations of a generally charitable nature, rather than transactional.
GoFundMe claims that less than one tenth of one percent of the fundraisers it hosts are fraudulent 
even if so, that still leaves a lot of fraud. And they apparently don’t include unproven medical treatments and outright quackery in that total, as a brief perusal of the site shows.
There are numerous fundraisers for therapy at the Burzynski clinic in Houston and for questionable stem cell treatments. You can even find appeals for money on behalf of providers of quackery, like the person who offers “distance reiki healing sessions”. Another example involves someone raising money on behalf of “wave regeneration therapy”, which is said to be quite the cure for what ails you, whether it be:
“Reduction of Covid Aftereffects, Chronic Pain Relief, Diminished Wrinkles, Improved Circulation, Body Detoxification, Accelerated Healing, Keloid Reduction, Neuropathy Minimization and MORE”
There are a lot of sad stories on GoFundMe and people desperately trying to find cures for loved ones. I hate to see money, time and energy diverted down useless avenues and benefiting only hustlers.
I have a problem with someone making money off of another’s misfortune.
I have donated to several GFMs; one of them was just a few days ago, to a local acquaintance whose husband is terminally ill and she is partially disabled and cannot work full time. They do not have any children.
I’ve seen a few, usually memorials for families with young children who lost one or both parents, that went into the 6 figures, whether they expected it or not. Those people definitely need some competent financial advice.
Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me, either.
Doctors, nurses, lawyers, undertakers, appliance repairman, roofers, auto repair shops – there’s a whole lot of professions you must not like.
You’re a special kind of idiot if you don’t understand what I’m talking about.
GFM is providing a service to help people in need. Why shouldn’t they make a reasonable profit? If they don’t, then the service won’t be available.
How would they know?
Apparently I’m probably a special kind of idiot, because I’m not at all sure what you are talking about.
I suppose things like that can probably be audited in depth on on a random sample, then extrapolated, but looking at the relevant page, I suspect it might not be done with anything like that sort of rigour. It sounds like they have a reporting mechanism for suspected fraud, and that they perhaps only find 0.1% of those reported cases to be fraudulent.
That depends on someone finding out about the fraud and complaining though. If someone falsely claims they are sick and gets donations from random public benefactors, it wouldn’t be hard for them to get away with it.
True, although from memory, the signup process was pretty rigorous and required some identity verification steps that probably make it reasonably difficult for people to fake their identity (at least, if they want to get the money out at the end).
Still, I expect most of their investigations probably assume innocence unless there is some glaringly obvious evidence to the contrary. I have seen some campaigns that were obviously fake - in fact when I set up a GoFundMe campaign to help my friend in Nigeria (related to a video collab on my channel), I did get some comments saying ‘guys actually the GoFundMe is here…’ and containing links to counterfeit copies of the campaign.
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Don’t forget the complete BS, lap-of-luxury ones
- I want to have the complete princess wedding - cost $6-figures
- Help me pay for my trip of a lifetime that I could never afford, it included
first-class airfareprivate jet, renting a mega-yacht, & other things that only Billionaires do.
