Toronto man had to fight GoFundMe to get paid after organizer gambled away funds for his brother's funeral
Allan Oliver says fundraising platform needs to do more to ensure intended beneficiaries are paid
In the aftermath of his younger brother's sudden death last year, Allan Oliver says he was surprised when a family friend set up a GoFundMe to help pay for the funeral.
"My first thought was like, 'Wow, I can't believe someone would do this for our family,' " Oliver told CBC News.
His brother, Aidan, a well-known figure in their community of Shelburne, Ont., was just 23 years old when he died after a medical episode on Oct. 30.
Oliver watched as donations from the community poured in — eventually, more than $15,000 was raised. He says his family then planned a larger funeral to make sure everyone could pay their respects.
"Through this fundraiser, there were hundreds of people helping us through it," he said. "And that was just really comforting."
Those feelings of comfort turned to anxiety in the months that followed, when he encountered repeated challenges trying to obtain the remaining balance of donations from the organizer.
On Nov. 11, the day of his brother's funeral, the organizer gave the family $7,000 of the $15,200 raised. But the remaining $8,200 had not been paid to him, and he had an outstanding bill from the funeral home to worry about.
"I was giving the organizer the benefit of the doubt," Oliver told CBC News.
His feelings of anxiety turned out to be warranted — months later, the organizer admitted to him in a text message that she had withdrawn the remaining money and gambled it away.
After public pressure from community members, Oliver says a relative of the organizer returned the funds to him this week — nearly seven months after his brother's funeral. CBC News is not naming the organizer as the funds have since been repaid.
Oliver is still pushing for policy changes at GoFundMe, and says the company needs to do more to ensure the intended beneficiaries receive the money that is raised for them.
A spokesperson for GoFundMe defended its current policies in a statement, saying misuse of funds is "rare." In the statement, GoFundMe also said it acted quickly to investigate Oliver's case and noted that it does have a Beneficiary Guarantee, which aims to ensure money gets to the intended recipients.
Months-long attempt to receive funds
In January, Oliver reached out to the organizer via text to ask about the remaining funds so he could pay the rest of the funeral home bill. Texts reviewed by CBC News show the organizer responded and said she had "lots of things going on," but that she'd call him. Oliver says that call never happened, and the organizer didn't respond to multiple messages he sent after that.
At the end of February, he asked the organizer if he could take over the GoFundMe account, and she responded that she would reach out to GoFundMe to try to arrange that.
In March, after receiving no further texts from the organizer, Oliver reached out to the fundraising platform through an online portal. In an emailed response reviewed by CBC News, GoFundMe told him they couldn't share information without permission from the organizer — who was CC'd on the note — and that they couldn't move forward in helping him.
Oliver again attempted to contact the organizer via text, but she didn't respond to the e-mail chain from GoFundMe.
In May, he says the funeral home told him interest would start accruing on his account at the end of the month if the remaining balance wasn't paid.
"It was stressful, it was frustrating," he said. "It's tough to really move on if you have this bill over your head that you have to pay."
GoFundMe reaches out
Then, on May 30, Oliver received an email from GoFundMe stating that they'd been told his family "may not have received the funds raised."
The email encouraged him to submit a claim with GoFundMe, which he did, also submitting proof that he was the intended beneficiary. After that, he says GoFundMe confirmed that the organizer had started withdrawing money from the funds raised on Nov. 6, and by Nov. 13 — just two days after his brother's funeral — the entire balance had been withdrawn.
"My heart was in my stomach," said Oliver. "It confirmed everything that I was most fearful of."
Oliver confronted the organizer with this information via text. In a subsequent message, she apologized and admitted she had "a very bad gambling problem." She said she wanted to pay him back but could only do so in bi-weekly instalments of $500.
In a June 2 email, after Oliver made GoFundMe aware of the organizer's admission, a company representative told him that its policy requires people to first try to remedy the situation directly with the organizer. They told him that in his case, since the organizer had offered to create a payment plan to recover the funds, he should speak with her before the company took any further steps.
They also told him that if the organizer didn't comply with the payment plan, he could then file a claim under their Beneficiary Guarantee.
Oliver questions why the company would make him responsible for recovering the funds — especially from someone who'd already demonstrated that she wasn't trustworthy.
"I just think that's unacceptable because they have all the proof that the organizer has misused the funds," he said. "And the onus shouldn't be on myself to trust the organizer for a payment plan."
Liability issues
Oliver says his focus now is on the actions taken by the fundraising platform itself.
"I think GoFundMe has handled this poorly, to be honest," he said.
He wants to know why the company didn't flag an irregularity when he reached out to them in March about dispersing the remainder of the funds, especially if they knew the money had been withdrawn months early.
"That should have flagged something within their internal investigation or fraud team to say, 'Hey, this guy is the intended beneficiary and he's saying that he hasn't received the money,' " said Oliver.
There have been other high-profile instances of money from GoFundMe campaigns being misused.
After the 2018 Humboldt Broncos tragedy, a man was sentenced to jail in part for setting up a GoFundMe for the victims, then depositing the funds into his own bank account and spending the money.
The challenge, according to one legal expert, is that it can be difficult to hold companies like GoFundMe liable when donations are misused because it would have to be proven that the company was aware the funds were going to be misappropriated before they were released.
"If you knew, or you should have known, that the funds were not being used for the intended purpose, then you would have liability," said Tanya Walker, a Toronto-based lawyer who has handled many fraud cases.
To try to prevent misuse of funds, Walker says GoFundMe could consider alternative measures — such as ensuring the funds are deposited directly into the account of the intended beneficiary, or introducing a third-party guarantor in instances where the organizer is raising funds for another person.
'A huge gap'
In Oliver's case, a GoFundMe spokesperson told CBC News that the company had "removed the fundraiser, and the organizer's account has been banned from using our platform for any future fundraisers."
More broadly, the spokesperson said, "beneficiaries are protected by the GoFundMe Beneficiary Guarantee, which offers protection in the rare case that an Organizer does not deliver funds to the intended recipients of a fundraiser."
But Oliver says that's not good enough, and that he doesn't believe he should have been asked to enforce a payment plan before becoming eligible for support from GoFundMe.
He says more needs to be done to prevent something like this from happening again.
"I think this is a huge gap in their systems and their policies of how to actually ensure money is being sent to the intended recipient," Oliver said.