#If you really want to help donate to a legitimate charity

[inner-muse]

Ironic how I reblogged a post about “asks from people who claim to be in Gaza and need money” are scams, and now my inbox is full of asks from people who claim to be from Gaza asking for money.

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

.

[fortheammonites]

Falling for scams does hurt people, actually

TW: Human trafficking, SA, torture, discussion of scam farms

I see a whole bunch of people arguing that they would rather risk giving to a scammer than ignore someone's gofundme. I also see people saying things like "I can't believe some sick people are profiteering off genocide" and like, me neither, but I feel like you guys really don't understand who actually runs these kinds of scams and what they are.

Scams of noticeable scale-- like scam asks being sent from hundreds of accounts to every user on Tumblr!-- are typically related to organised crime in poor countries, not Susan from Milwaukee who wants a new coat and has no scruples. People get trafficked by gangs to scam farms in Asia and Africa where they're worked to the bone and tortured trying to get idiots in wealthy countries to part with their money. Genocide profiteering is pretty much the least evil thing these people do.

Here's a UN article on it. Obvious warnings for content related to human trafficking and SA.

When you donate to a scammer, you fund these organisations and give them a reason to exist. It's possible some of the fundraisers are legit. I honestly find it unlikely given I'm not seeing any from any other countries where urgent fundraisers would seem to have great reason to exist but which haven't captured the same level of attention on Tumblr-- the number of Sudanese, Congolese, Ukrainian, Burmese or Uyghur fundraisers in my DMs is a fat 0. In any case, there are safer ways to help.

If you want to help (which is great!) you don't have to take the risk of paying for human trafficking. Donate to legitimate charities which have the resources to safely and effectively ensure the money and help is getting to the right people. Funding human trafficking rings in Myanmar is not a good risk to be taking while trying to help.

[bet-on-me-13]

Danny runs for Mayor

Simple Prompt: Danny runs for the Gotham Mayor position

Extended Prompt: Danny is an absolute little shit throughout his entire campaign but still manages to win because he is legitimately one of the best candidates around

Just imagine the crack that could come from this!

Reporter: What is your stance on Vigilantism? Danny: Well I agree that Vigilantes are helpful for the communities that need them, and they should work with the police at every opportunity, I feel like the idea will always be a city where Vigilantes are not needed. Also I fail to see the relevancy of the question, there are no vigilantes in Gotham Reporter: What do you mean? What about the Bat-Family? Danny: No, Batman isn’t a Vigilante. Batman is a Crime Lord.

Or

Danny: As mayor, I promise that I will not be infected by corruption. Not because of my moral standings, but because I absolutely fucking hate clowns and I will never accept a bribe as long as that guy is still alive. Yes this is me putting a hit out on the Joker. Crime Bosses, if you want to try and bribe me, you gotta kill him first or I won’t even consider it!

Or

Batman: Why is a Meta-Human running for Gotham Office? You know this city doesn’t have a very good track record with people like you. Even the Signal had a rough start. Danny: Well, I just had a strong compulsion to help this city reach the peak of it’s potential *looks over Batman’s shoulder to see Lady Gotham holding up Cue Cards telling him what to say. She promised to help with his paperwork for the next 50 years if he became Mayor and helped fix her city* Danny: Such a strong compulsion...

Or

Penguin: Look kid, I don’t care if you have enough power to destroy me at the subatomic level, I have enough money to ruin you, your sister, your parents, even your uncle! Danny: Oh really? I could get the souls of every person you have ever killed to get confessions out of them. Or I could give them the power to rip you apart. Or I could even just possess you and donate all your money to charity.

Or

Danny: Oh god dammit! Vlad: Hello Badger! Glad to see you followed in my footsteps instead of your fathers! Danny: This wasn’t because of you! Lady Gotham asked for help! Vlad: A WIN IS A WIN!

[terrestrialnoob]

To say that Bruce Wayne didn’t like Vlad Masters would be an understatement. Masters refused to treat anyone not obviously rich with any decency, was allergic to admitting he was wrong, used underhanded business tactics to get unconscionably one-sided deals, and kept everything just barely on the side of legal. All on top of having the reputation as one of America’s Most Charitable Billionaires with how much money he gave into rare disease research, that just so happened to also be America’s second biggest tax write-off for one individual. It wasn’t a private feud either. Bruce had gotten, first, in a donation war for who could fund the most charities, which Bruce had thought was in good fun, until it soon became clear that Masters was taking it far too seriously and tried to sabotage a charity event. Bruce wasn’t sure how he did it, but “it was lucky that Batman was there” to get everyone out of the burning building. Bruce then learned just how competitive the man was, and if he didn’t let him win, there’d be more innocent people put into danger.

So, you could imagine his surprise when he got a phone call from a dejected sounding Vlad Masters. “Bruce, it may be hard to believe, but I need your help.”

“With what?” Bruce didn’t want to deal with this man-child’s ego tripping, but he could never refused a cry for help, whether legitimate or a trap.

Vlad sighed loudly into the phone and Bruce thought for a moment he had been hung up on and missed the beep. But after the long pause Vlad said, “Recently, some old college friends of mine died.”

Bruce absorbed that in the shorter pause that followed. First that someone like Vlad had friends, and second, that their deaths meant something to him.

Vlad continued, “Jack had been a rival of mine and I had never forgiven him for marrying the woman I’d loved or – he also caused an accident that had left me hospitalized for months. I still say we were friends because, well, he never stopped trying to be mine despite how horrible I was to him. We had met when he and I were in a horrible punk band, and then I met his friend Maddie and the three of us made – Sorry, I don’t mean to ramble...”

“It’s understandable,” Bruce responded, “But, you said you needed my help? I have a really good grief counselor if that’s something you’d like?”

“Ah no, you see, Jack and Maddie had a son,” Vlad paused, “They had a daughter too, but she was home when their basement laboratory blew up and their entire house collapsed into it. The three of them, as well as three other teenagers, died. Danny was the only one to survive, and he is now in my care.”

“Jesus,” Bruce sighed, “Does he-”

“Before you offer, a bad experience with a school counselor has him sworn off seeing any kind of professional.” Vlad cut in, “And my bad behavior with his parents beforehand has convinced him I’m some kind of evil supervillain who wants world domination or some such nonsense. He wouldn’t trust anyone who’s associated with me in any way.”

Bruce nodded, seeing where this was going, “But you and I are openly rivals.”

Vlad hummed in agreement, “And you unfortunately have firsthand experience with both losing your parents and helping a grieving teen through the same.”

Bruce sighed, he was getting another kid, wasn’t he?

[apollos-olives]

Do you happen to know if the charity UmmaRelief is legitimate? I keep getting ads on youtube for their "bring hot meals to people in Gaza" but from what I've heard based on your posts and reblogs, food in general is not getting into Gaza?

If they're able to help I absolutely want to donate but I do NOT want to give money to liars taking advantage of all the suffering in Gaza to make money. On first glance it looks like a legitimate charity but I know how easy it is to set up a legitimate looking website so I would love to hear your thoughts.

looks fake. the website is really weird and uncomfortable plus the ads on youtube are under the name of a publisher and not a corp so idk. instead of worrying about a random ad you found on youtube, there are other legitimate organizations you can donate to instead. i wouldn't trust anything unless it comes from directly a legitimate palestinian source or person. hope this helps

[tiger-moran]

Not to darken the mood but why are so many people complaining about """scam discourse""" (some people really need to have the word 'discourse' taken away from them, I swear) and apparently jumping to assuming anyone who's suspicious about some of the Gaza fundraisers must be actually accusing Palestinian people of somehow trying to scam them? I don't believe for a second that's what most people are concerned about, the people who are actually willing to donate money aren't all going around accusing Palestinian people of making up that they have little kids or faking that they have sick elderly parents or whatever. They are just rightly concerned that some of these blogs claiming to be people in desperate need in Gaza are really some kind of spam bot set up to scam people or they are actually other people who have nothing whatsoever to do with Gaza or Palestinians lying about being someone trapped in Gaza cos they think that's an easy way to get money for themselves. Sorry but when it comes to the latest """hot issue""" for people to go on and on about (until the point where they forget about it and move on to obsessing over something else of course), too many people seem to lose all critical thinking skills. Time and time again people have lied about all sorts of stuff to get money for themselves; people have been scammed out of many thousands of pounds or dollars or whatever other currency in plenty of cases and often entirely because they were trying to be kind. There have been so many scams even just on tumblr, people getting scammed out of money for creative projects or people getting scammed by people lying about vets bills when all they've done is stolen photos of an abused animal from an actual legitimate animal rescue charity for instance. The scammers end up running off with people's money and are probably laughing all the way to the bank while the actual needy causes get nothing. But then it comes to this and suddenly apparently we're just supposed to trust every single one of the thousands and thousands of people asking for money? Even the ones that are so obviously just bots? Even the ones who ask for money through sites nobody's ever even heard of? Or the ones who ask you to just donate straight to their paypal account? And even though the more scammers get donated to, the more real actual people in desperate need lose out (which in some cases may well be effectively a death sentence for them).

Also I know damned well if a lot of people are accusing people in Gaza of just lying about having kids or sick grandparents or whatever then they're the people who were never going to donate anything to any of them anyway, they're not the people who do want to actually help them.

[la-principessa-nuova]

About Me

Name: Sabrina

Pronouns: she/her

Age: 28 ± 1

Gender: Nonbinary Woman

HRT: E/Spiro since 2024-05-28

Neurotype: AuDHD girlie

Romantic Orientation: Lesbian

Sexual Orientation: Lesbian

Geographic Orientation: 35° NE

Relationship Status: Cursing the Distance

Top Fandoms: Dropout (esp. Dimension 20) and Doctor Who

Creative Medium: All of them but badly

Occupation: Software Engineer

Call Me: Hot, not pretty. JK, call me both, and beautiful too. 😘

❤️🧡🤍🩷💜 🩷❤️🧡💛💙💚💜 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵

Mutuals, feel free to DM me or submit asks about whatever. I guess everyone else can too, but no bigotry of any kind, and don’t be creepy.

Due to the constant ask spam, I assume any ask/DM/tag asking to donate or share a fundraiser is a scam and block you. See my additional notes below the fold for more details on that.

I have a loose system of tagging that I mostly stick to, and you can find a list of links to tags here.

Additional Notes

To clarify what I said about donations, I promise you that I really do want to help, but there are a couple reasons that I am unable to engage with this kind of stuff, largely due to my disabilities:

Based on past experience, I am not very good at distinguishing between real campaigns and scams without extensive research, which absolutely will take me hours if not days. While I appreciate blogs that ver campaigns that just shifts it from verifying the user asking me to verifying hoth’s blog who verified them and that they really were verified.

I am hypersensitive, and I get multiple spam asks every day with extremely sad stories asking for donations, most of which are probably scams, and I often come on here to cheer me up when I’m starting to feel hopeless, which has been a lot lately. When I started getting these I became noticeably more sad and hopeless and I had to make a rule for myself that I block them without reading it the second I detect that it’s a request for donations. I literally look up and go through the motions of blocking in my peripheral vision the same way my dog looks up to avoid instinctively eating the treat when I tell her “leave it”.

When I donate through an established charity, my employer matches 100% of my donation (up to a limit that I haven’t been able to afford to hit since back when I still lived with my parents), which makes a big difference in the amount of good I can do with the money I donate.

But I do sincerely apologize to anyone who legitimately needs help that I mistake for a scammer and block. I do also have filters set up to hide posts asking for donations, but I do bypass the filters and view them when I’m feeling up to it (I actually do that with a lot of sensitive topics and I highly recommend using filters this way).

On a brighter note, I do have a few side blogs. I'm not secretive about them (and often accidentally post to or reply from the wrong one), but I won't link them from here. You've got to put in the work to find them.

I have a few side blogs that I don’t actively hide but also don’t link to. Mostly gimmick blogs and some RP blogs of characters I find it funny to reply as. A couple are more of like me with a different set of filters, but also kinda sorta playing a character? idk it’s hard to explain.

You might occasionally see me mention something offhand about calorie counting or losing weight. I have a medical condition that the only cure for it is losing weight and getting certain nutrients that help with it, so I have no choice but to do that stuff or it will get worse and become life-threatening. I try not to mention it a lot to not normalize diet culture, but it’s not a secret or anything.

But I promise that I have a really healthy mindset around it and mainly the calorie counting is to force me to think about what and how much I’m eating. My goals are really loose and moderate and even then i break them all the time whenever it gets in the way of living life too much.

Also if you feel compelled to give me money, you can do that on Ko-fi here.

TERFs and other transphobes, go fuck yourself.

[max-the-valkyrie]

Hello, I'm sending this to warn that you may have reblogged a potential scam taking advantage of the situation in gaza.

The users profile isn't them. It is stolen from a gofundme that is completely seperate to the fuzzyyouthcreation situation.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/house-a-gazan-homelessm-family-in-egypt

Above is the link to said gofundme fundraiser, It has already raised $30,000 and has no mention of diabetes type 1 anywhere.

The second thing is the claim about type 1 diabetes. Every medical and charity (chartities that are for diabetes support and awareness) source I can find, says that a type 1 diabetic would be dead within 2 weeks, usually in the first few days, without insulin from Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA). I cannot find a single source that says they could live 3 months without insulin.

Fuzzyyouthcreation seems to censor anyone who points out any questionable aspects of their post or profile.

I'm sorry if this comes off as confrontational or aggressive, that is not my intention. I just think you have spread and potentially donated to a scammer, that is taking advantage of a really fucked up situation.

Here is a list of trusted organizations to support palestine if you still want to help out.

https://buildpalestine.com/2021/05/15/trusted-organizations-to-donate-to-palestine/

Ah shit.

You know, my original gut instinct was to delete this DM asking for money because “ah, a random link. That must be a scam”

But no, that would’ve been too pessimistic of me, right? No one would be begging random people in DMs unless they were truly desperate, right? Surely people aren’t so cruel and idiotic to try and selfishly profit over this horrible situation…

Right?

:/

Sigh.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention, genuinely. I appreciate you taking the time to not only warn me but also to provide legitimate organizations. :)

[themathomhouse]

Scams work by preying on people's trusting nature. Charity and fundraising scams are, unfortunately, really common - and often spring up in the wake of high-profile conflicts or natural disasters. Often they will pretend to be a real charity - however, this is getting more difficult as in many countries (including the UK and the US) there are organisations set up to monitor and regulate charities to ensure they are actually doing the job they claim to do.

So, increasingly, people use crowdfunding websites or ask for cash donations. Why? Unfortunately, it's to make it harder for you to get your money back - as well as explaining away why you can't really verify what it's claiming.

It is a nice thing that people want to help. Unfortunately, you do also need to do your due diligence before you donate. People fraudulently claiming to be a charity or lying about being in a disaster area or whatever it is are taking money and resources away from the people who really need it.

The FBI have a page with some helpful tips on avoiding scams, which I will try to summarise:

- try to donate to a charity whose work you were already aware of and can verify - in the US you can check the Federal Trade Commission and in the UK the Charity Commission

- be wary of any new organisations set up after an event or disaster

- check the names of organisations if they seem similar to others, they may be using that to trick you

- don't click on links from asks or emails if you don't know the person. Links in this post should come up with the URL so you can verify it is a legitimate website

In terms of disaster/war/refugee scams, you should also do a reverse image lookup on any pictures and search any names provided. So, so many real images are stolen and used for these scams, so if you get hundreds of results - that's a scam. Multiple blogs using the same name? Probably a scam. Multiple blogs getting asks at once, or you're suddenly getting multiples per day with similar wording? Almost certainly a scam.

I think many on the website could also benefit from reading this link on how to turn your negative emotions into impactful giving:

You can also look into volunteering, doing sponsored events or charity sales, or other ways you can help people experiencing difficult situations.

Your instinct to trust and to help is a genuinely good one. The problem is people who take advantage of that, taking your money away from the causes and people you were trying to help.

[boreal-sea]

Gentile here with a good faith question. But also, please feel free to dismiss. Take care of yourself first. Sorry for the coming wall of text.

I’m shooting this your directly because I find your blog thoughtful and informative, and I infer you might have some pertinent knowledge based on your posts.

I see a lot of my (also gentile friends) engaging in activism that concerns me. I understand the desire to do something — anything — to help those who are suffering in Palestine, but their rhetoric is antisemitic, almost cult-like, and as several Jewish tumblrs have pointed out: is that activism actually doing anything to help Palestine, or is it just hurting Jews?

And, I’m not immune. Yes, there are avowed and self-aware antisemites and that’s not me, but I feel like a lot of us are getting swept up into it without realizing it. A wave of a wand, call it anti-Zionism instead, use rhetoric that resonates with leftists. Like, I’m very worried that some of that thinking has infected my own world view, even as I try to unpack and dismantle my own antisemitism.

Which is to say, I don’t know how to trust my own gut right now.

I want to DO something that helps those who are suffering, and doesn’t harm Jews. Ideally I’d like to find good aid organizations to donate too, I’m really not sure what else I CAN do.

But which organizations, that’s the rub.

Take Medical Aid for Palestinians, which I was looking into because I stumbled across a itch.ion bundle supporting them.

On a google search, most of the hits seem to indicate they’re legit. A notable exception was the NGO monitor, but as I looked into that site, according to some sources NGO monitor is a right-biased Israeli organization with links to the current Israeli government. Since they’re the only source I’ve found so far decrying MAP… does that mean I can disregard their complaints and safely donate to MAP? Or, is my reluctance to trust NGO Monitor unfounded, and routed in my own ingrained antisemitism?

And to make matters worse, hey this is all just text on the internet, fake sites can look very official, and ever robots are writing half of this shit now so what’s a queer to do?

So, how do I sift through the legitimate organizations that are providing aid and/or working towards peace, from the ones that are just fronts for terrorists?

More than just a list of ones you already trust. I mean, I won’t turn that down, but I want to learn how to figure this for myself to so that when I encounter things like this bundle, I know whether it’s safe to donate or not.

Thanks for reading this. If you’ve got some wisdom to share I appreciate it. If not, or if you don’t have the energy to spare, again, please take care of yourself first.

So I always preface these asks with the fact that I am only a convert-in-process, so I am still learning and I don't know everything. There are some things I will never know, not being a Jew from birth, not being Israeli, etc.

To your first question: does the antisemitic rhetoric employed by some pro-Palestinian activists help Palestinians? No, it does not. Being bigoted towards one marginalized group cannot benefit a different marginalized group. All it does is add more hatred to the world. The only thing antisemitic "pro-Palestine" rhetoric does is hurt Jews. Hurting Jews does not benefit Palestinians.

As for MAP... my advice is first to look at what NGO is saying is untrustworthy about MAP, and compare that to what the other sites say about it. Then you need to consider NGO's motivations and political leanings, which you've already started doing. Think about what reasons could they have for discrediting MAP. Do they have any Palestinian aid organizations they do support? What do the other sites you used have to say about those other organizations? If you're still not sure, it's generally good advice to go with what the majority of the charity ratings sites say. If NGO disagrees, and you've found reasons it might have its own biases, then you treat it like an outlier and depend on the consensus of the other sources.

There are right-wing organizations and people in Israel who hate Palestinians. There are organizations in Israel that are biased. There are Arab organizations that are biased. Country of origin means nothing. If multiple other sites are calling a particular org out, there's probably a reason. You will unfortunately have to put in the effort to double-check everything.

For searching news sources specifically, the MediaBias/FactCheck website is highly regarded.

Note that no source you use is ever going to be free of criticism; even MB/FC has detractors. Reliable sources can sometimes make mistakes. No one is perfect.

Media literacy is a huge problem right now and you're not the only person struggling with it. My best advice is to do exactly what you've done: read multiple sources, compare that information, and then make your decision. It is not your fault this stuff is difficult to navigate.

[jbt7493]

if your stance as a maker of a "vetted fundraiser list" is that its such an important crisis that you need to lie to people to make them more likely to donate, but you dont actually vet the fundraisers, there are a few options

there is of course the obvious "you are one of the scammers". Which. It is very strongly incentivized for a scammer to try and make it onto the group of people organizing this list.

theres being too lazy to bother, in which case you're a fucking self righteous hypocrite and are willfully helping funnel money away from palestinians and into the pockets of scammers because this extremely important thing isnt important enough for you to care about actually helping

you just believe that there arent scammers with no evidence or that the scammers are somehow actually just as in need of money as refugees of a genocide, in which case you are a fucking idiot, sorry. no way around saying that one.

or perhaps you believe acknowledging scammers exist would reduce would-be-donators confidence enough that not only donations to scammers would drop (good!) but also donations to palestinians- but as a reminder, all these donations to gofundmes that might be real could be going to charities that are completely guaranteed to be legitimate. and i dont know how to tell you this, but willfully lying *makes you untrustworthy*. if you actually did some work you could make an *actually* vetted list of fundraisers, where all the donations would go to real palestinians instead of some, and knowing that you arent perfectly fine with half of your list being scammers would really inspire more confidence in me not less.

also, as a reminder- nothing wrong with people wanting to get their families out of palestine, i cant blame them, but the conditions, number of slots available, and the fees are all ridiculous and being used to extort palestinians. not all palestinian families can cross the border. the ones left inside matter too- and you could be paying for food and water to be given to them, something which would benefit a larger number of palestinians, benefits from economies of scale (ie if they receive a hundred donations of 100 dollars each, they can buy more food per hundred dollars than you can), and doesnt incentivise officials to jack the price of border crossing up to extort even more. and unlike these gofundmes, the UNRWA is actually trustworthy and has publicly available information on whats being done with the money

[adelle-ein]

regarding your latest post, at first i had rted one or two jackson hinkle posts since the sheer numbers on his posts seemed to encourage the idea that there would be more reach of the videos he was bringing attention to, but his account felt odd to me and once i snooped a little and realized he's a white supremacist it became clear that the fact that he was getting so many numbers compared to the sources the videos he posted were originally from is precisely what was so insidious about it all. and that's, like you said, true of quite a few white supremacist accounts that are trying to capitalize on this situation. it's so despairingly evil. i'm really sorry you're having to see so many people rt from those kind of sources, i can't imagine how frustrating it is, and i really hope more people bring attention to it. i did see a post going around on twt about jackson hinkle being a white supremacist but i'm not sure if there have been any made about some of the other figures. are there any names you would particularly recommend watching out for?

Yeah, Hinkle is a huge one that I've seen going around. In my case, I have a lot of big name nazis already blocked, so it's hard for me to know for sure if people I follow are rt'ing directly from them. I hope not, but there's no way for me to be sure, and frankly they've demonstrated such bad judgement I wouldn't be surprised. I will say that off the top of my head Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate have joined the "pro-palestine" cause (obviously not genuinely), and both are dangerous nazi lunatics. I would also STRONGLY discourage interacting with Hasanabi, who is ostensibly a "leftist" youtuber but has joined many far-right and bigoted causes in the past, including helping kick off the mass harassment of Amber Heard last year. If you want to support the charities he's done streams for, donate to them directly, don't go through him or give him publicity.

The ones I'm mostly seeing people retweet aren't big names, they fall into one of two categories:

a) "Meme accounts" made specifically to spread nazi rhetoric, generally with blue checks. Honestly, treat a blue check as a red flag, ESPECIALLY if it's not under a real name. Check the bios and timelines. Like I said, greek statue avatars are a favorite of these and are massive red flags. Emphasis on "manly" or "male" strength is really common. Also look out for "conspiracy" themed language, ie "what THEY don't want you to know" "the REAL news" "the REAL truth" "[x] supremacy" "jewish supremacy" "deep state/elites" etc. They use memes a lot, which like…don't retweet memes and jokes about people dying just in general, maybe (that's another complaint i have about the way people are behaving), but also know it's a red flag. If the bio isn't enough then scan their timeline and see what else they've posted, especially before October 7th. You'll almost certainly find out and out antisemitism and transphobia. Also bear in mind that gold checks just mean paying Musk more money, they're not necessarily "legacy" or legitimate sources or anything like that.

b) This one is sadder, but younger teens who recently discovered politics and have just completely been indoctrinated and are lashing out at all Jewish people as a result. Go to their timeline and see them talking about how antisemitism isn't real, how the Hamas attacks were completely fake, how the entire conflict was manufactured to make "them" money, and Holocaust denial (and generally interacting a lot with the above listed nazi accounts.) They often support Russia and similar politically too because they're angry at America. There's a lot of them on here as well. It's sad but it's dangerous and they shouldn't be given platforms. This one is easier to not notice, though, since they aren't necessarily hardcore white supremacists, just kids who got roped in and aren't necessarily going to be blowing as many dogwhistles in their display names, icons, etc.

in general just be careful, be mindful, and seriously keep an eye out for blue checks -- a LOT of these accounts have them.

[aikoiya]

Arcane HC - Thoughts on Piltover

Honestly? I feel like Silco has the wrong impression of Piltover.

At least, the common Piltovans.

Like, I actually don't think that most Topsiders actually know about what actually goes on in the Undercity. They don't know about the mistreatment & extremely high death rates or anything. All they know is what they're told by the people in charge.

If they did, I think that the Counsel would have a lot more trouble on their hands because Piltovans are... just people.

And, in my personal experience, people generally try to be good. Like, it takes a very hurt person to not want to try.

What if the general populous of Piltover actually believes that the Zaunites are being taken care of? What if there are food drives & clothes drives & charities to provide money & medicine & to send resources to the Lanes & they're actually very successful because everyone figures 'hey, we don't need these things as much as they do, they'll go to waste anyway if we don't, so why not give it to them', but something happens to them? Like, maybe it's all being sent to the frontlines to help with this war we hear about in the show? Or some group of Anti-Zaun assholes takes it all? Or whatever.

Like, drives & charities happen in real life, so why wouldn't they take place here? It's just that... the idea that there wouldn't be pro-Zaun activists & Zaunite rights activists or Zaun charities is extremely unusual to me & even seems very unrealistic. Like, look at the U.S.! Slaves had supporters in the form of a Union & there was even a civil war over it! One that split an entire country in half! And it was the people who had the most to gain from the status quo who did it! The Republican party exists because people thought that slavery was immoral! There have to be people who want to do right by their fellow man or it's much too cynical!

Like, be as pessimistic as you want, but the simple fact that slavery is no longer as widespread as it was proves that people care more for their fellow man than some would have us to believe.

Sure, maybe there was a hidden agenda behind it. We don't know, but at the end of the day, people who were once considered 'less than' now have more freedoms because of it.

I bet there's an entire lab in the biology department of the Academy dedicated to phytoremediation, which is a study of hybridizing plants with the express purpose of detoxifying the environment. As well as a club to study subterranean flora, fauna, & fungi.

Or what if Viktor has a project in mind to create an artificial sun in order to build greenhouses down there?

All with the intent of purifying Zaun to make it able to grow it's own crops. This would allow the Undercity to be more independent of Piltover.

It'd be one small part of something I call the Zaunite Vitalization Effort, or ZVE.

I bet there's a section of the Underground that's been set aside with the hopes of turning it into a sort of farming district. I'd call it the Duskmeadows.

I just... think about it! I say these things from personal experience because as a member of the middle class, myself, my family donates food & money ourselves because why wouldn't we? There's also missionaries to underprivileged societies & Christians donate their money with the expectation that it's going to provide supplies for those who need it literally every Sunday.

It'd be unrealistic & nihilistic for it not to be the same with Piltover.

Hell, there are even a handful of rich people irl who actually use there money for genuinely good things to actually help people! Look at Mr. Beast! He payed for a lifechanging surgery to cure the blindness of a thousand complete strangers! There are really, genuinely good people out there of every class! Even if he did it for the clout, it's still a very, very good thing he did that legitimately helped people!

And, imagine if it were true that there were charities & drives & all this other stuff with the idea of providing things for the Undercity & all those resources weren't going to their intended destination & the Pilties learned of this.

I imagine that there'd be riots in the streets!

What if all it ever took to establish the nation of Zaun... was spreading awareness of the situation throughout the Piltovan middle & lower classes? Even the higher classes to a degree!

Hell, what if we ended up with a reenactment of the French Revolution & the invention of the guillotine? What if it was started by Piltover citizens themselves?

And if this were true, how would the Zaunites react to this??

How would Vi, Jinx, Vander, & Silco react?

I mean, it'd basically fly in the face of everything they believed!

---

Now, I'm a baby fan. Brand new to the fandom, so my apologies if I'm wrong, but this is just my perspective.

Most of my knowledge of League comes from watching Arcane & I have little to no knowledge of the League of Legends game.

So, please keep this fact in mind.

Arcane Masterlist

[greaseonmymouth]

I’ve been avoiding reblogging stuff about Palestine and Israel on here because it’s not what I use tumblr for (and also because I prefer to get my political news from outlets that aren’t tumblr) but I have seen a massive increase in these gofundme posts on my dash in the past few months, including a massive increase in guilt tripping. And every time I want to say, but vetted by who? Why are you letting yourself be preyed on like this? Please take a breath and look after yourself and think twice before sharing the gofundmes or donating to them.

As OP has pointed out, most of them are scams. I cannot trust that any of the ones making the rounds here are any of the few legitimate ones. I also do not have a ton of money so when I do donate, I want to be sure my money is actually going somewhere it can help.

Here are two organisations I have been donating to:

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF)

Save The Children (I have actually been donating to the Danish branch Red Barnet)

These are reputable global organisations with a documented history, paid employees, volunteers, and the means to bring aid to where it needs to go.

As OP mentions there are multiple reputable charitable aid organisations that could really use your money to actually help people. There are likely even local branches in your own country you can look to. Here are two orgs in additions to the ones I mentioned above:

United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)

Anera

And here are two websites that can be used to look up a charity:

Charity Navigator

Charity Watch

And look, maybe all that is overwhelming and frightening and maybe you feel like you’re just throwing money into the void. Maybe you don’t even have any money to spare and are just reblogging all the gofundmes because you don’t know what else you could be doing. Here are a few suggestions:

Stop reblogging the gofundmes. Frankly, get off tumblr when it comes this stuff. There is no way to verify anybody’s identity on this website. Anonymity is a feature of this site. The blue checkmarks aren’t real.

If you really absolutely must do your activism online and on tumblr, please start sharing posts about reputable organisations, like the ones mentioned in this post, instead

Check if there is a local organisation to you that helps refugees and asylum seekers where you live that you can support instead of reblogging into the void

Online clout isn’t real and you don’t need to perform. By this I mean: it does not help Palestine or Palestinians that you are driving yourself into the ground yelling about this stuff online, letting yourself be guilt tripped and then turning around perpetuating the guilt. Look after yourself

Local organisations often struggle more for money and support than the big global orgs, so please consider these. After all, once the refugees have gone somewhere else, they still need support. Here is one example of a local-to-me organisation that I support:

LGBT Asylum Danmark

And finally: You cannot save the entire world. Do not let yourself get preyed on and burn out with guilt and stress by manipulative scam campaigns. Do what little you can to help and remember that together we will make a difference.

I am Amira, the breadwinner for my family after my father's death. We were forced to flee to the southern part of Gaza after the war intensified. Our home, my university, and my workplace were bombed😢.

We are now in desperate need to escape this danger and continue my dream and educational and professional journey💔. I kindly ask you to donate or share the campaign link. Your support can save our lives and give us a chance to live in peace🍉.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart🙏.

Hey folks! Let's have a quick conversation about charity scams, because God love you little peanuts but you are spraying my dash with this "Save Amira/Noor/Abdullah's family/etc" shit these days.

In brief: if you want to help the people of Palestine, give to a legitimate organization, like the UNRWA (as I have). Individual "Palestinians" or "Palestinian families" reaching out to solicit donations are overwhelmingly going to be scams.

"But I reblogged it from someone who said that this fundraiser was verified!" The person saying that is either (1) in on the scam, (2) actively the one running the scam, or (3) painfully naive. "Verified" by who? How? They never say. It's always just some shit like "I've known Amir for 12 years and he's like a brother to me, that's how I know his heart is true." I can say that too. I just made Amir up, but our bond is real and his Facebook profile is 100% legitimate. Please consider his need for €30,000 verified.

I get it, I really do. You want to DO something to alleviate all some of this suffering, and helping an individual or a specific family feels more real than giving to a faceless organization. That's why those "for only one dollar a day, you can feed this specific photogenic child in Africa, who will make you a piece of bespoke macaroni art as a token of his love and gratitude" organizations do so well. Attaching a face to the suffering motivates donors. Reputable charities like Save The Children know that, and so do scammers.

But when you allow scammers to take advantage of your empathy and your desire to help, you are directing money away from the people who need it. You are directing energy away from where it would do some good.

Charity scams have surged since Israel's invasion of Gaza. Some scammers set up entire fake websites pretending to be legitimate relief organizations. Some scammers hack or spoof legitimate Palestinians' e-mail and social media accounts in order to solicit donations. But all of that is a lot more work than putting together a photo collage of some rubble + some attractive Arabic-looking people in what plausibly might be Gaza, setting up a GoFundMe, and copy-pasting the same message to a few hundred or thousand accounts on social media. Like...this is literally the lowest effort scam out there. Social media monitoring tools have tracked a 40% increase in scam-related content since the "All Eyes on Rafah" movement gained momentum.

Some of these Rafah crossing GoFundMes are legitimate. It is deeply unfortunate that there is no easy way to tell them apart from the frauds which vastly outnumber them. For those who are pained by these appeals for aid, and want to give to an individual or a family instead of a reputable relief organization, please consider:

There are more than 800,000 refugees in Rafah at this point.

Egypt only lets a very small number of people through the crossing every day. I've read numbers as low as 150 and as "high" as "a minimum of 500," with 250 being the figure reported most.

Every one of those people needs to pay between $6000 and $15000 to make the list. If you get added to the list but miss your window, due to lack of internet connectivity or, you know, any of a hundred other reasons why the people in Rafah might not be able to check a fucking website right now, you lose your place, lose your money, and have to start the whole process again.

To put it bluntly: every person who pays to make the Rafah crossing is taking one of a horrifyingly small number of slots away from the other 800,000 refugees, and it's not even a guarantee of escape. And the more money that gets funneled into this process, the higher that price will rise, as corrupt and opportunistic travel agencies and Egyptian officials gouge desperate people for as much as they can get.

This is not an effective way of spending your money. Unless it's for your personal family, in which case, yeah, obviously you do everything you can to get these people specifically out of Rafah. But if you just want to "help the Palestinians?" You're not.

Which brings us to Amira here!

Clicking through to Amira's GoFundMe brings you to this little gem, organized by an "Abdallah Alanqar," which features the kind of writing I'm more used to seeing from clickbait retellings of Reddit posts designed to get you to look at ads.

"When sorrow and difficulties strike hard, hope becomes the lone star in the dark sky. This is the story of Amira, a 23-year-old girl who found herself bearing the burden of her family after her father's death three years ago due to the coronavirus."

Am I...am I meant to believe this is her bedroom? Amira's personal bedroom? This is clearly catalogue photography.

"After her father's passing, Amira found herself taking care of her family, consisting of her mother, sister Noor, and brother Abdulrahman. Her mother, suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes, faces health problems that further complicate their situation. But courage and determination drive Amira forward."

Good, great, well-lit stock footage of rubble, gotta have some of that. The same photo collage is also used in this GoFundMe for "Mohammed Alanqer," also run by "Abdallah Alanqar." That one's a little better, Abdallah clearly at least raided someone's actual Facebook page for family photos. Amira's here has no photos of her at all, and just one selfie on her Tumblr.

Mohammed also has a Tumblr! The pinned post starts with: "Hello, my name is Mohammed Alanqar, and I am from Gaza Palestine 🇵🇸. I write to you today with a heavy heart💔, seeking hope and help. The ongoing conflict has put my family's life in grave danger🙏." Weird how this ostensibly 36 year old man writes exactly like our 23 year old Amira.

Also, if you go to Mohammed's Instagram, it's 100% interior design photos from either AI or magazines - you know, the kind of stuff you usually see on fake Instagram accounts - until July 12th, at which point it suddenly switches to tons and tons of photos of this one Arabic family. I hope they're alive, whoever they are.

It goes without saying that if you Google any of the names of the people mentioned in these GoFundMes, the only thing that comes up is the GoFundMe and the promotional social media surrounding the GoFundMe. That's weird, right? Mohammed ostensibly had a start-up (not that we're told what it was called). Amira was a student. You'd expect that Googling their names would turn up something.

Anyway, back to Amira.

"Amira worked as a teaching assistant at the university while pursuing a master's degree in data science, and also worked as a programmer in a company. Her life was going smoothly until war came and destroyed everything."

Just "the university" and "a company." No details, nothing that would let us actually look up if Amira exists or not. (They also include more stock footage of rubble here, I'll spare you.)

"Her university, workplace, and home were completely destroyed, forcing them to flee south in search of a safe haven. Now, Amira and her family live in tents for displaced people in Deir al-Balah, where they suffer from water shortages and the spread of diseases, posing an additional challenge, especially for her immunocompromised mother."

Note that they don't say fled south from where. I'm not sure about the relevance of the photos here; is this supposed to be depicting the dirty, abysmal conditions in Deir al-Balah? Because this is just what outdoor cooking looks like. I had an identical meal in the backyard of a Lebanese family I knew growing up. This looks like a nice day. The close crops + blurred edges on these photos are there to make it harder to find the original images sources, btw.

Blah blah blah, you get the picture. This is nothing. Amira doesn't exist.

"But her post says she was vetted!"

Sure enough, her pinned post does feature this:

I don't know any of these people offhand and wouldn't blindly trust them with my money, so let's dig a little deeper, shall we?

Nabulsi's post is not "vetting." It is an uncritical reposting of the information (and images...) in Amira's GoFundMe, without any additional comment or context.

Fairuzfan's post is just a wordless reblog of - oh, what's this? A post by "Ameera Alanqar," as in, our OP? Just a different blog run by our good friend Amira here? And all of the posts on that blog are about Amira and Mohammed, and how much of your money they need?

Sar-soor's post is just a wordless reblog of Nabulsi's post. Again, no context or further information provided.

Aaand 90s-ghost's post is just a wordless reblog of the same post, again, reblogged from @amira-alanqar, a blog which has now been deleted. Add it to the list with @amira-world and @ameera-anq.

I found another deleted blog called @palestinian-fundraising which put a big "VERIFIED AS REAL" stamp in red across the bottom of these posts, with a link that just goes back to...Nabulsi's reblog. None of this is vetting. None of this is anything.

I know you're upset. I know you just want to help! I know you want to do anything, even if it's small, even if it's just reblogging the words of some desperate young woman or family man in the hopes that it gets them a tiny bit closer to safety and peace. But you are accomplishing nothing but putting money into the pockets of scammers. Amira's GoFundMe has raised €17,826. "Mohammed's" GoFundMe has raised €48,958.

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

[loki-god-of-mischief-13]

This is definitely a scam

they sent me two asks so I went to check their blog. Scan spotting:

This might be reaching but similar to the porn body asks they use

way too many emojis

I don’t think real Palestinians would create tumblr blogs to ask for money

also aren’t they supposed to not have internet?

This is a relatively ne blog . Their first post was made 8 days ago

If you want to really help real Gaza’s use reputable charities. Here’s an article with charities that sound good, but before donating to any do your own research and make sure the money you send goes to real people not just scammers or Hamas.

also the charities who say they were vetted, are usually vetted by people in on the scams.