I logged into my bank’s website today and found I had a deposit that I wasn’t expecting for $4.55. It had the letters “WPY” followed by a comment “Helping out with Ho” followed by a phone number. After some Googling, I found that the “WPY” and phone number indicated that it was from WePay and that WePay processes GoFundMe payments. I did make a $5 donation to a campaign called “Helping out with Hospital Bills” in February (I have not helped anyone out with a ho. 
) so I assume it’s related to that. I logged into my GoFundMe account and I don’t see anything indicating that my donation was refunded for any reason. If the money was refunded, would that show up somewhere in my account or would I get an email about it? If there’s a fee that gets deducted for refunds that would explain why the deposit doesn’t match the amount I donated, but I couldn’t find any information about it on their site. Has anyone else encountered a GoFundMe refund that they didn’t request? Is this anything I should worry about? It’s probably fine but seeing unexpected activity on my bank account makes me nervous.
I got one of those too, yesterday. Through the same detective work, I discovered the same thing you did. I’d donated $20 to a friend several months ago, and $19.12 of it came back to me a few days ago.
I’m not worrying about it right now since it’s a deposit, but it did confuse me. I’ll keep an eye on the account.
I have two, possibly wrong, assumptions and a possible answer based on those assumptions.
1)I believe I’ve heard that with some of those crowdfunding sites, if they don’t hit their goal the money is refunded. Or, at the very least, the recipient can refund the money.
2)I believe that some (all?) of those sites take out a percentage for credit card processing before passing it to the recipient.
My guess is that, for whatever reason, the money you donated was returned to you, less the credit card fees.
It’s possible that this is a way to make sure the bank account is active before making a large withdrawal. There was a thread in GQ recently that talked about how credit card scammers will make small purchases at first to see if the transactions are denied before making their large purchases. Several years ago my PalPay account was hacked into and the first transfers were small, starting with less than a dollar and after about 4-5 transfers, they tried to transfer $3800 out of my checking account. I laughed because I only had a couple of hundred dollars in the account and PayPal reversed all the transfers once I notified them. Now, I never transfer money directly from my checking account for any payment.
Also, I don’t recall exactly why, but on the rare occasions I did receive money through PayPal, there would be a small random deposit of less than $1 that I had to confirm I received into my bank account before the larger payment was transferred.
No, dear, I wasn’t I wasn’t “wasting our grocery money on Blow ‘n’ Ho’s”. But if a friend needs help paying for seminary, I’m not going to turn them away in their hour of need just because they happen to be a prostitute. See the note from the bank? I was just Helping out with Ho…
Good to know the I’m not the only one this has happened to.
This is what I’m hoping happened. It’s reassuring to see someone else arrive at the same idea.
This was this type of situation I was worried about. I’m not sure if scammers use deposits to check if an account is active or only small withdrawals.
Thanks, all. After giving it some thought, I feel better about the situation. It was probably just a refund from GoFundMe. I’ll keep an closer eye on it though.
A legitimate example of how a small transaction is used to verify the account is active. When you use your credit card to pay for gas at the pump, you’ll see a $1 charge on your credit card that goes away once the full amount of the charge goes through.