They raised $400K for a homeless vet. There’s none left to give him, lawyer says | Hacker News Reader

They raised $400K for a homeless vet. There’s none left to give him, lawyer says

washingtonpost.com

40 pointsdsr1228 comments

Good old fashion GoFundMe fraud.

>Bobbitt filed a lawsuit against a New Jersey couple who had raised more than $400,000 on GoFundMe to help him rebuild his life, alleging they'd withheld the money and spent it on vacations, gambling and a luxury car. A judge gave them until Sept. 3 to hand over the remaining funds. But a day after the deadline, a lawyer for Bobbitt said there's no money left to surrender

This is why I refuse to use GoFundMe, I think fraud like this is rampant and underreported. There's been many times when you see a sad story in the media and multiple GoFundMes are created for the person in the story by people who are unrelated to them, or some who are related but have less than honest motivations. It's just too ripe for fraud and abuse. Even if I 100% know the campaign is real, I won't use the platform out of principle.

They claim they would release the money once the homeless man got off of drugs. I don't even think that's appropriate, if they raised money for him they will have to accept he will spend it the way he wants.

I also tired of GoFundMe rather early. Every sap with a sob story had a GoFundMe. Now, some I feel true compassion for: funeral expenses, medical expenses, and the like.

But then I started seeing some that were like "Eh. Whatever". Stuff like "I need to buy my college books" or something where it's like "Yeah, you kinda need that, not really an emergency, but if you don't have the money and are trying to avoid credit, yeah, whatever".

Then the ones that are just blatant begging. "Hey, I want to go on vacation". "Hey, I want to move back home". "Hey, I want to be a streamer and I need all this equipment". Fucking sorry, mate. If I had $5 to pitch in for any of that, I'd pitch it into the "I'm gonna do that shit" fund before yours. I understand you need to live your best life, but not at my expense. Sad thing is that people I know have engaged in these.

And of course, just blatant fraud.

I mean the move back home one is kind of necessary. It means that the person failed to be independent away from their support network without being homeless

>This is why I refuse to use GoFundMe

I've always wondered how https://www.gofundme.com/searchinternethistory turned out...

This is why state welfare is so much better than random charity. People hate goverment bureaucracy, but it is there to make sure that money ends in the right hands. It is not 100% foolproof, but it is way better than this.

Don't donate to random charities, then. Donate to established ones with high levels of transparency or trust.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/

https://www.givewell.org/

> This is why state welfare is so much better than random charity

What is the "this" here. Is it the fact that so little of the actual donated money reached the recipient? I'm not even certain that the ratio here is worse than US welfare. Some sources seem to say that only 25-40% of welfare reaches the recipients, with the remainder spent on various administrative programs and continuing education (which is hard to quantify in actual benefit). The source here is a digestion of [1], which is admittedly a bit dubious, but I haven't hunted down a better one yet.

Or is "this" the unaccountability of the corruption? I think the jury is still out on that one (or rather, a jury has yet to be convened and an indictment has yet to be issued, though it seems like the civil judgment is at least making its way through the system). If the perpetrators get off without penalty, then I acknowledge your point. And I concede there is a larger point here in that an unknown amount of fraud for similar cases is never really accounted for; these people happened to get caught, but if money is being raised for a cancer patient without a family, and the patient never gets the money and passes away, then we'd probably never even hear about it.

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-welfare-dollars-do...

The article you are citing indicates that the administrative overhead is less than 10% which isn't really all that bad. As you pointed out about another third (in more sane states) goes to other aid programs which yes is hard to quantify but arguably likely done with good intentions and far away from corruption or inefficiency.

Explicit administrative overhead is one thing; the question is where is the money going. The "other" bracket is a big mystery, but even in the best case, the actual money is being given to people (instructors, etc.) who perform some acts, possibly measurable, possibly not, and not really in a competitive marketplace. Adding more oversight here would increase administrative overhead, so there's a tradeoff. McClure and D'Amico encouraged Bobbitt to enter rehab; and thus did some "work" for which they could grant themselves "reasonable" compensation. It's obvious that they went a bit overboard with the stealing of money, but it's just a slightly more accountable version of the endless quagmire that is government bureaucracy. And by accountable, I mean that if all goes well they will suffer a punishment for what they have done.

My point is not so much that state-run welfare is worse than what these criminals have done to Bobbitt, merely that it isn't an open-and-shut case. For that matter, I'm not sure how this compares to other countries with a more extensive social safety net. And really, how this compares to various well-run charities, which often have funding structures that are as arcane as any government agency.

FWIW, some people might appreciate that charity is voluntary and not coerced.

How quickly they became corrupted by money. Hopefully they get prosecuted for fraud.

In their eyes a homeless man didn't deserve it all because of drug abuse, so instead they spent it on trips and a BMW for themselves.

https://abc7.com/society/all-gofundme-money-is-gone-attorney...

I think that's just a defense strategy.

A pretty bad one I'd say, but I doubt they really thought they deserved the money because of his conditions. Sounds more like an excuse rather than a reason.

The right thing to do would have been to spend some of that $400k for a lawyer, to set up a trust with Bobbitt as the beneficiary and the lawyer as the trustee, put the principal into a no-fee index fund, and distribute $1000 per month, $200 (0.6% of principal annually) to the law firm for trust administration, and the rest to pay for Bobbitt's housing, utilities, food, and fuel, in that order. $12000 a year ain't much, but even if it doesn't keep the wolf from the door, it ensures the door continues to exist.

Then you step away from the funding campaign and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. If you're still self-interested, you hold out a secret hope that someone else sets up a campaign for you to reward your virtue and pay it forward.

And that's the same thing to do if you win the lottery. Pay a lawyer to handle the taxes and set up a trust, give yourself a (nearly) guaranteed inflation-adjusted income for life, and protect the principal from you and your temptations. Salesmen, scammers, and crooks can only milk you for a month at a time, instead of for everything you have all at once.

I'm wondering, can you set up those sorts of trusts for adults who have not been deemed incapable of handling finances?

This is sad on multiple levels.

$10,000 would have helped him immensely. Could have put him up in an apartment for a while, gotten some new, fresh clothes, etc, and he probably could have started turning his life around.

$400,000 is life changing to most people. You can set yourself up in a reasonable situation with that kind of cash. Basic shelter and transportation at the very least. And that's a huge load off for most people.

So yeah, I can see the temptation when the nice thing you wanted to do explodes into basically winning the lottery.

So you start thinking about it. He's just a homeless guy with an opioid addiction. So you put up the barriers. He needs to get a job, he needs to be clean for X days/weeks/months.

And really, what's the legal obligation? I mean, you bought him a camper, a TV, a phone, a vehicle. You've done far in excess of $10,000. Why don't you deserve something as well. Dude was just lucky the internet took to the story. Could have been anyone. I've paid him back. He wouldn't even have a whiff of this money if not for my compassion. Where's mine?

And then we're here. Fighting a homeless guy for a couple hundred thousand.

GoFundMe is not about giving money to some dude, it's about looking like a good person. Indulgences were popular and successful because of this basic human need to posture as a good person. Charities often get away with double dealing behavior because absent strict controls, the tendency will be to structure the organization such that it's highly efficient at generating the appearance of goodness while the principals of the organization embezzle everything.

I remember this specific instance because it was being portrayed favorably on local TV news when I was visiting my inlaws, and I was characteristically a skeptical grinch. This confirmation that I wuz right about this has made my shrunken heart grow three sizes this day.

Increasingly gofundme is looking like some large scale money laundering tool. Want to support political persons XYZ? Tell them to start a gofundme and then watch it magically fill up with hundreds of thousands of dollars

This is sad.

Indeed, though mildly predictable. If true, which is yet to be seen, They probably saw the money and thought why should someone else get so much money while they continued to struggle.

In that case why start fundraising in the first place?

They expected to raise 10k, but instead won the lottery.

(Not apologizing for what is clearly fraud, and hopefully they will spend a bit of time in prison after having all their assets liquidated and turned over to Bobbitt through civil actions)

They started a fundraiser for $10,000, which ballooned unexpectedly to $400,000. If I had to guess, I would say that they thought that $10,000 was reasonable for Bobbitt, and would have "happily" turned it over. But $400,000 they saw as excessive and unreasonable -- like the GP said, "why should someone else get so much money while they continued to struggle". $10,000 wouldn't have changed their life in a significant way, but would have tremendously helped Bobbitt, but $400,000 probably just seemed frustratingly unfair -- it would give Bobbitt a lifestyle in excess of theirs, and the only reason the money was there was because they started the GoFundMe. So really, it's their money, when you really think about it, because they raised the funds. Right? Right?

Bobbitt was checked into rehab recently, too. Coke binge much?

I've seen things like this first-hand, where it all goes horribly wrong with the best of intentions.

It starts when you hit a Neccessity, look over at The Pot that you're supposed to be safeguarding, and think .. I could pay it back before they even notice it's gone. I mean, if The Pot says it has 400k in it, and I just borrow 5k for this urgent Neccessity .. in theory I don't even need to pay it back until they get to that last 5k. It doesn't need to be there now, it needs to be there when they reach for it.

It's like the perfect line of credit. No interest, no approvals, no terms. All you have to do is be able to justify it to yourself.

So the car gets fixed, you pay back The Pot, everyone's happy. Or another Neccessity pops up before the last one's paid off, and the hole gets a little deeper. And each time, the boundaries get erroded just a little bit more, and the bar for how urgent, or how neccessary, drops a little lower.

If they honestly didn't believe a lump sum would be beneficial, the money should have gone in a trust where access was controlled. This often looks like overhead, but consider it a neccessary evil.

There's a very good chance this couple weren't actually being malicious, just irresponsible. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, etc.

This story is so emblematic of today's America. GoFundMe to help a veteran in need. Media attention leads to huge results. Everyone involved suffers from various addictions. Everything goes to shit. Lawyers, tech company and media likely the only ones making any money off this.

sounds like jail time to me

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