Charles Johnson’s GoFundMeasle

Up in smoke is where their money goes.

Yeah, that’s a graph of actual and cumulative donations from data burgled from Charles Johnson’s own begging bowl, spanning June 2015 through March 2020. Except for an initial windfall of $2,583 in June, there hasn’t been a lot of activity. After 4 years and 7 months, the big boy has garnered just over 53% of his goal of $20K. BTW, I didn’t add the “smoke.” Excel did.

Here are the monthly totals (sans the June 2015 outlier). The unusual bumps in donations are a mystery, but the months with no donations whatever are no surprise.

Some folks here (including me) suspected that Charles has been priming his pump by taking his winnings and plowing them back into the fund for appearances. Breaking out the “anonymous” donors from the rest doesn’t prove the theory, and there’s not a lot of correlation.

Many or most of the anonymous donors could be legit, but they can’t be vetted – only Charles can do that because GoFundMe ID’s contributors and allows the host access. (The host can also edit the donors’ love notes as we’ve noted previously.)

GoFundMe also does something else: they charge fees. The going rate is 2.9% plus $0.30 per donation. As of 31 March 2020, Chuck’s begging bowl contained $10,615.00, so
[($10,615 x .029) + (237 donations x $0.30 per)] = $378.94 that he won’t get.

Oh yeah, almost forgot:

Happy 67th Girthday, Charles!