Ask HN: Experience/Assistance with Gofundme Issues
I recently ended up in an economic catch 22 and launched a Gofundme campaign [0] to help break the cycle. Which seemed to work fine until it was time to withdraw the donations. I had to ask a non-technical friend to step in as beneficiary since I currently don't have access to a bank account, which he somewhat reluctantly agreed to.
I'm currently hanging by a thread economically and desperately need to get my hands on the donations asap, and new issues just keep popping up; so I figured it wouldn't hurt to see if someone here can pull some threads, share experience and/or offer advice.
The first issue we ran into was that he couldn't even finish his verification because of a bug that locked the country code for the campaign to the same country used for my previous campaign. That got resolved after some back and forths with the support.
Once my middle man beneficiary accepted his invitation, Gofundme started flashing his name on the campaign. Which of course made him even more nervous. Some more back and forths with the support ended up with the advice to simply change his name since they couldn't hide it for whatever reason.
He then finished his verification, entered his bank account and we got a page saying that the donations were on their way and would take 3-5 days to get here. 5 days later, I started getting nervous since there was still no sign of the money and my beneficiary was by this point suspecting the whole thing was some kind of scam.
So I started digging around in the campaign settings and was surprised/devastated to find that it now listed my beneficiary as not even having verified his identity. Which is more or less where we are right now. I've contacted the support again, but they just don't seem very well organized and keep telling me they'll be back within an hour which never happens.
Thank You!
[0] https://www.gofundme.com/f/analogistics