GoFundMe: Rich Pickings, Unless You're a Greedy Idiot?


So, I don’t know about you guys, but I remembered this story back when it first broke when Bobbitt (apparently unrelated to the guy who had his :eggplant: cut off by his angry wife) was aghast to find that his two new friends were not going to give him the hundreds of thousands of dollars raised in his name on GoFundMe.

Just a few months later, and it appears that everyone was in on the scam. If it wasn’t for those meddling social media people and cops (and greed), they would have gotten away with it too! Story:

This is a story the British Independent newspaper, which covered Bobbitt’s growing horror at being scammed by his scammy associates in September :flushed::

There is some (current) speculation that they gave B-boy what they did in the hope that he would accidentally overdose and they could continue to alert everyone to their new-found, ill-gotten wealth by spending all their money ostentatiously.

I can’t be the only person who has noticed that GFM is pretty much a scammer’s paradise, can I? It’s like the lazy man’s Kickstarter, where people go to beg for thousands of dollars just because - and then get it if their sob story is good enough!

Discussion point: Crime pays: but not if you’re a bloody idiot. Or invent your own discussion point and share stories of criminal greed elsewhere in the world gone wrong due to greed and/or stupidity.


I would love to surrender my morals and become a criminal mastermind. You can pick up wifi jammers on eBay. My plan would be to use one to knock all the bleeding tourist drones out of the sky during summer and sell them on eBay. Alternatively, there is the charity route. it always works best if you ask me.

I worked for a fundraising company once. Our official job was to harass people on the street in different cites into giving us money for whatever charity was footing our bill. In reality, our team leader was running drugs between everywhere we went. I protested about this and lots of other things. This resulted in me being abandoned in a field near Matlock a few days before Christmas.

Later I rumbled the whole drugs thing and the company threatened to sue me. However, they went bust shortly after for tax fraud.

I like the genius of this homeless person scam. In fact, I find it less morally damning than all these Youtubers who do social experiments on the homeless. Sadly, they all got greedy. That’s the problem with crooks. Greed always leads to their own self-destruction.


What a bunch of weirdos!

I don’t donate to any cause online, unless it’s something I know for a fact is legit - like as in I’ve visited the facility and verified their web address!

I like to donate to reputtible causes, but I’d get highly irate if I were to find out it was a scam cause! I guess people have no morals in this world.

I mean as freelancers, we all know how cheap people can get. Chargebacks after months later, returning a 99 cent short story book after two weeks, threatening bad reviews to get money back then use the materials anyways.

I wonder if there really is such a thing as Karma - and if it really comes after scumbags! :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:


I make money online. I invest in stocks. Simple.

My views on charity are clear. I have never asked anything from anyone for free, and will not give anything to anyone for free.

Everything I do has a self-interest.

I donate a lot of money to Hindu religious organizations, temples, RSS and to BJP (ruling party)…but that’s my duty and done with my self-interest in mind, not charity.


Sadly, very few causes are reputable these days. Just look into all the goings on with Oxfam this year. A lot of that is NSFW. In this case, I won’t lower the tone of the forum by rambling on. However, from my experience, every big charity has a closet overflowing with skeletons.

I used to donate to causes I thought were worthwhile. Now I just give money direct to local charities.