i feel obligated to talk about this bc i am egyptian and one of the central reasons people from gaza have been fundraising is because of egypt's border policy, which is no longer active since the rafah border was destroyed
i know nothing gets people more heated or self-righteous than the idea that they might be getting scammed, and i know the gofundmes here can be overwhelming in your inboxes and i know for many people in the west who want some kind of reliable process this can seem sketchy but palestinian bloggers on here (and palestinians across platforms including on gazafunds.com) don't want you to be scammed any more than you want to be scammed, and they have put in an extraordinary effort to verify information literally in the middle of a warzone
the truth is you all have no idea how difficult this entire process is from top to bottom, tech companies and fintech companies literally hate anything that passes through this area. i'm banned from uber and doordash because i used an egyptian credit card while travelling and it flagged their automated fraud systems and they never reinstated it lol like that's how arbitrary it is. and egypt is one of the better-connected countries in the area.
the entire reason people in gaza are relying on gofundmes is because the barriers to entry and exit are not accidental—they're deliberate! this is literally what being occupied and middle-eastern means. it means you don't have easy access to bank accounts, you don't have easy access to fundraising, you don't have easy access to your own records, and you are automatically mistrusted by the world at large of how thoroughly dehumanized your language and your people have been during a genocide where you are being bombed and living in a tent. this is also part of what it means to be a refugee from the global south or to be a refugee from the global north, where these processes are expedited (as they were for ukrainian refugees, for example) precisely because they are part of the structure of a war.
like just to explain to you guys how difficult it was for me (someone with access to networks across the world) to get money to a friend in gaza, because egypt's also going through an economic crisis and transferring usd here is close to impossible: to get 15k usd (enough to get 3 people out of gaza) to the office in egypt that registers people for evacuation, that family needed
a stable internet connection to communicate with us (they were only able to get in touch briefly every other day)
first-degree relatives in egypt to register for them
people from abroad who could raise the money for them (which they did; they were family friends who knew them)
an egyptian with a usd bank account and a foreigner coming to egypt who could carry usd in cash to divide it among themselves because there is no other way to receive that amount of money here at once
we managed to get the money to their relatives here, they managed to register them, and then the rafah border was destroyed. so now the are just waiting while being bombed and displaced from one area to another. and this is a family who had every connection needed. imagine how it is for people where only one of these links are dropped?
that's why the work the palestinian bloggers do here to support palestinians in gaza is necessary, because they fill in for people who don't have good language skills, who don't have friends abroad to fundraise or vouch for them, who don't have relatives in egypt who can receive money for them, etc
does this mean every fundraiser is 100% reliable? no. this is why the verification list exists! the things i would be wary of would be if someone sends you a false or phishing link, or if someone who is running the campaign from abroad decides to scam the palestinians they're raising it for and refuse to send the money, both of which i've witnessed personally
but the likelihood of someone faking being from gaza and getting onto the verified list is much smaller because the verification process is rigorous and like i said, palestinians themselves don't want to be promoting scams. but also most of these gofundmes protect your donation, meaning if someone disputes it you get your donation back. they are paranoid to the extent that they will sometimes refuse to pay out people in gaza even after the campaign goal is reached for no reason except that anything from the middle east is generally regarded with suspicion. i've seen paypal also refuse to do the same
as a matter of fact from a tech standpoint it's so, so much easier for someone located in the west to create a fake gofundme/phishing scam than for a palestinian to do so, but by that token it's more difficult for someone in the west to convincingly fake being from gaza. which is why the verification list and other initiatives (like again, gazafunds.com) are so important
i have tried to get gofundmes on gazafunds before and i can promise you their process is rigorous. you might not see a lot of the paperwork behind a specific campaign but i know they don't add campaigns unless they verify their IDs personally or through a network of trusted references. the bloggers on here are a volunteer network working independently, of their own effort, and they are doing their best in what is a genuinely horrible situation. the border is closed now but people in gaza have worked out alternate ways to receive money raised online (again, often via relatives transferring to each other outside gaza or other means) and aid hasn't been coming in for months and those regulating the aid were killed, which means extremely limited supplies and high inflation, so money raised and received now is literally survival money that goes wherever it can, and people are very desperate to raise as much as possible as things get more dire. there is no employment in gaza right now. people have been living off their savings for ten months.
is that simple to convey to some blogger on tumblr donating 5$ to a gofundme? is it simple to understand? no. and that's part of the structure of genocide. you aren't going to be able to venmo someone and get a receipt like you do if you're donating to an org, so volunteers are doing their best to fill in the gaps for that by making sure you know how your money is helping real human beings while relieving the pressure on these humans, in a genocide with limited internet, to constantly post about themselves.
the fact of the matter is that your risk of being scammed by a gofundme from the verified list or gazafunds dot com is extremely low, but the damage of of assuming (and even worse, claiming) these campaigns are a scam is extremely high
if you don't trust a campaign, don't donate to it. if you notice a red flag you feel like the bloggers verifying might have missed, alert them to it. if you notice someone impersonating one of the verified campaigns on here (also common) alert people to it. i often have difficulty identifying which blogs are legitimate because they are deleted and remade so frequently, so i just try to reblog posts from the verified list or promoted by palestinians bloggers as i donate to them.
don't cast doubt on the process if you don't understand it, and don't be cruel about a situation you should pray you never experience—and odds are, if you have a US passport and a US bank account, you never will.
also i want to add a couple of extra things:
sometimes people DO use stock images to explain their situation, like "this is the area i'm in" or "this is an example of what's happening to me" because they feel like those images are more descriptive, they don't want to use images from their real lives for privacy reasons, or they don't have a good camera or a good connection to send their own images. i have seen this happen with a few people i know personally, some of whom were able to describe this ("the image used is just an example") but some of whom were unaware that they needed to do so. so this criteria unfortunately is not always helpful, unless someone is obviously trying to pass off a stock image as their own or lying about it.
more than once palestinians i met in cairo in person have shared a gofundme that they've started and they'll say "a nice person online helped me set this up" or "a friend of a friend got one so we set up ours" because that's how these have worked so far, and i look at them and i know they seem fake or unconvincing because they don't have enough images or they don't have enough descriptions.
conversely, a lot of people have learned to over-embellish instead to make it seem more convincing and appeal to more people, which has clearly had the opposite effect here.
a lot of times i've thought, "if i didn't vouch for this nobody would believe this was a real fundraiser" and that's particularly why i found those posts so casually dismissive and ignorant. unless you've been in this situation or have tried to help fundraise, you won't understand how harmful and generally unproductive these "watch out for scams" posts were.
this is why you shouldn't take these "i vouch for this fundraiser" posts lightly, because this is literally all there is to it. yes, you might not know that blogger so that is meaningless to you, in which case—fine! it's not meant for you! it's meant for that person's following, who do know them and have known them.
some of the posts in your inbox are spam but not all—they are people completely unfamiliar with this website who heard it's a good place to fundraise trying to fundraise in any way possible, usually by going through the notes of a popular post and messaging people there with a stock appeal for help. they don't have success with everyone they send to, and certainly some are scammers taking advantage (more than a few of which palestinian bloggers were the first to notice and warn against). these are people for whom social media is also entirely hostile and it's also grown more difficult to fundraise on twitter and meta because palestinians keep getting shadowbanned, and so they use social media as a tool and not as a hobby. this includes strategies like mass-messaging and appeals to humanity, because they're not here to make friends or blog. they're here to fundraise.
most of all if you don't feel comfortable with it, then just ignore it! there is no need to absolve your guilt of ignoring these messages by deciding they're all scams, and there was absolutely no need to smear the bloggers who do participate in this without understanding what they do. i said above if you feel confident that something is a scam (especially if you are familiar with the situation, less so if you know jack shit about it), you should message the bloggers who have vetted it and ask because they don't want to be promoting scammers either. there is no shortage of other ways to help, and there is no shortage of people who need help.
