During a press conference four days after the fires started, Kathryn Barger, the chairman of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, said she was forced to pay a fee of $ 95 to the company for a donation of $ 500 To do to a friend whose house had been lost in the fire. “I was shocked,” she said, adding to the company, that “they deserve to be able to pay for their overhead, but at the same time we are in a crisis.”
Mrs. Barger even confused the option to leave a tip about donations with a mandatory fee. Those tips are the primary source of income from Gofundme and what makes it possible to be profitable, say company officials. But the tips, which can be adjusted from 0 to as high as 28 percent, are voluntary. The company also charges a reimbursement of 2.9 percent for all donations, as well as 30 cents for each transaction, which says it covers credit card and bank transaction costs. It also achieves income from Classy, a subscription based software company that helps customers, including the World Central Kitchen and Salvation Army, raise money. Gofundme officials hurried to contact Mrs Barger's office and to make the confusion, although not before several points of sale published critical articles.
It happened that Mr Cadogan had done volunteer work for a search and rescue team looking for dead bodies in Altadena when the controversy broke out, and he was not aware of the public relations disaster. But the next day he met Mrs. Barger during a community meeting. “She gave me a huge hug,” he said, noticed that Mrs. Barger had promoted fundraising.
It was hardly the first time that the site was confronted with pushback. Over the years it has been attacked for organizing campaigns by anti-vaccin activists and a fundraising by the men behind We Build the Wall, a charity that $ 25 million has collected to build a border wall with Mexico, but later was accused by prosecutors to illegally distract that money for personal use. One of the founders of that group, Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser of Mr. Trump, will be tried next month for fraud in New York.
Although the Los Angeles Wildfire Fund-Rarries have not generated that kind of political controversy, they were closely examined after countless people reported that they discovered Copycat Fund-Raisers who used and designed images of their houses to take advantage of the Publieke Stormloop Greatness.
