5 Tips Before Donating to Online Crowdsourcing Sites Like GoFundMe

Go Fund Me has been used for years to raise money for various causes, like sick children, disaster recovery, and even business ventures.

While the website has helped countless people with legitimate causes, there have also been countless incidents of fraud related to the website.

5 things to know before opening your virtual wallet:

Tips for funding tragedy relief:

1. If someone is looking for help following a personal tragedy, see if their GoFundMe page is linked to their Facebook page (this is the case more often than not). Using their Facebook page, you can try and investigate the validity of their unfortunate event. Indicators can be friends posting condolences to their wall and shared news stories on the subject of the tragedy.

2. Sometimes in cases of personal tragedy, multiple GoFundMe accounts are created, but this is not always a red flag. For instance, when something happens to a child, often two pages are created to represent each side of the family. Also, sometimes multiple pages are created to avoid GoFundMe taking percentages of the money raised. If you do notice multiple pages for the same cause, take the action advised in tip #1.

3. Overall rule in funding tragedy relief: A good overall rule is to only donate to someone you to either know personally or know through someone who can vouch for their tragedy. Often, this is how you will have heard about the GoFundMe page in the first place.

Tips for funding business ventures:

4. If someone is looking for help to fund a business venture, check and see if a page has been created for the business itself, and how long this page has been active. If the business has no Facebook page, or if the GoFundMe and Facebook pages were created close to the same time, this should be a red flag. Also, you can message people who have ‘liked’ the page and see if they have any knowledge about the business.

5. Overall rule in funding business ventures: On other crowd funding websites, like Kickstarter and Indieogo, page creators offer donators something in return (making them investors rather than donators). As an overall rule, these websites a safer bet to help fund a business venture.

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