Anndrathere's a journalist in UK left twitter who was a freelancer a couple years ago and had some kind of incident in which her laptop got stolen and she claimed to have lost most of her novel and was now unable to finish it or recover the lost bits which hadn't been backed up. so her friends (with her blessing) set up a gofundme and set the target as £1000 iirc. bit high for an Emergency Laptop but whatever, right
this person was popular enough and had enough followers (around 6000 at the time I think) that the £1000 target was reached very quickly. then they raised the gofundme target to £5000 and said it would be a "writer's grant". they reached £5000 too, and put the target up to £7000. At this point people were starting to go 'uh this is feeling like a scam' so they said that all money over £5000 would go to charity
people stopped donating and the gofundme petered out somewhere south of £6000. which is still a huge amount! Anyway there was fulsome thanks from this journalist for the money donated to her, a starving freelancer. Then a week later she went on a month long holiday to Athens, and also started a paid columnist gig at the Sunday Times (which must have been in the offing when the crowdfunder was going)
Oh, and to cap it all off, turned out she'd recovered all but a couple thousand words of her (commissioned) novel. Weird that. so a Left Twitter person essentially scammed £5000 out of people with a fake story of hardship and poverty and then went on a mediterranean jolly before taking up work at a Rupert Murdoch newspaper
there are grifters everywhere! they'll go on to tell you what good socialists they are! they suck!
channing tootum@AnndraADunn i remember she wrote the sentence "my trans friends are hurting right now" in the sunday times, seemingly with zero awareness
Josh@edknock @AnndraADunn oh my god, incredible
@AnndraADunn god I didn't even know this bit, grim grim grim