> But there were clearly people on the internet who believed what they were seeing. The fundraising campaign for Clemons’ funeral services drew $325. The one for Baker nabbed almost $800.
It's worth noting the scale that these frauds operated at. The typos and grammatical mistakes in the "news" reports were probably there specifically to avoid getting attention from too many people so that the fundraisers would stay smail enough to fly under the radar.
This seems inevitable for any effort that seeks to make a "platform" for "connecting market participants" it always ends up becoming awash with scams, shams and flim flams.
It strikes me that this is enabled by the Internet because it suddenly removes all external checks one cane do in the real world to validate a claim. Back in the day if the Miller boy was in a tragic accident the community all knew and could pitch in. Nowadays I don't know if Eliza who is a 13 year old with cancer is actually a suffering young girl or Fransicojeet in Elbonia.
Ultimately this is the end result of altruism in a system with bad actors and low trust, the generous are taken advantage of by the unscrupulous.
You can avoid the worst of it by taking reasonable precautions.
We recently donated to a GoFundMe run on behalf of a friend of a friend. It was a fatal accident that was reported in 5+ local news outlets, with multiple of those outlets linking to the GoFundMe. The local firefighters were one of the top donors to date.
Between the personal connection and the other bits of evidence we were very sure that the fundraiser was run by a real person for a real father who really did lose family members and have others end up in the hospital. We obviously don't have any control over where the money ends up in the end, but we knew enough to be willing to risk it.
Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Any payment system that is easy to use will get used for fraud. The internet has the same problem as visiting a large city, you can't trust people and you generally never see them again once they've taken your money.
Almost every chatroom I'm in has banned GoFundMe links and those that don't ban them entirely still require permission to post one.
It's worth noting the scale that these frauds operated at. The typos and grammatical mistakes in the "news" reports were probably there specifically to avoid getting attention from too many people so that the fundraisers would stay smail enough to fly under the radar.