During a news conference four day after the fires began, Kathryn Barger, the chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, said she had been forced to pay a $95 fee to the company to make a $500 donation to a friend whose home had been lost in the fire. “I was shocked,” she said, adding, of the company, that “they deserve to be able to pay for their overhead, but at the same time, we are in a crisis.”
In fact, Ms. Barger had confused the option to leave a tip on donations with a mandatory fee. Those tips are GoFundMe’s primary source of revenue and what allows it to be profitable, company officials say. But the tips, which can be adjusted from 0 to as high as 28 percent, are voluntary. The company also charges a 2.9 percent fee on all donations, as well as 30 cents for every transaction, which it says covers credit card and bank transaction fees. It also draws revenue from Classy, a subscription-based software company that helps clients including the World Central Kitchen and Salvation Army raise money. GoFundMe officials rushed to contact Ms. Barger’s office and straighten out the confusion, although not before multiple outlets published critical articles.
As it happened, Mr. Cadogan had been volunteering on a search and rescue team looking for dead bodies in Altadena when the controversy broke out, and he was oblivious to the public relations disaster. But the next day, he ran into Ms. Barger at a community meeting. “She gave me a massive hug,” he said, noting that since then Ms. Barger had been promoting the fund-raising site.
It was hardly the first time the site faced pushback. Over the years, it has been attacked for hosting campaigns by anti-vaccine activists as well as a fund-raiser by the men behind We Build the Wall, a charity that raised $25 million to build a border wall with Mexico but was later accused by prosecutors of illegally diverting that money for personal use. One of the founders of that group, Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, is set to face trial for fraud in New York next month.
Although the Los Angeles wildfire fund-raisers have not generated that kind of political controversy, they have been closely scrutinized after numerous people reported discovering copycat fund-raisers using images of their homes and designed to profit off the rush of public largess.