The thread this morning about the person asking if some one could deliver them shopping that got deleted

OP, it really isn’t safe for you to turn up at an unknown persons address with food and nor would it be safe for her to give you her address.

The safe way would be PayPal. And that would mean monetary transactions taking place.

OMFG. My post was automatically hidden because I mentioned the other site. Unbelievable. I came on to show how the OP of the begging thread Was doing the same thing over there just the date of the payday was different so clearly a scam.

@Byallmeans

It was not the op's first attempt at asking, they had been given good advice previously. They were trying to scam you.

Volunteer for your local food bank or give them your spare food/ your cash. I donate regularly to my local one and they dont turn people away. Your local school will know which children are hungry, the teachers might take food donations to "supplement" the lunches for poor children if you wished.

Or donate food via the olio ap - there is often plenty of food available there that the op could have accessed if in genuine need. They werent in need.

Yes. You really can self refer to a food bank. Most are Trussell Trust and they have made a lot of covid based changes, as have we in our community based charity.

Covid support groups all over the UK have worked hard to contact people in need and get food to them. They work with a wide range of local organisations and have been doing a lot of largely unacknowledged work. Anyone who can register here and ask for help could just as easily find very local, very comprehensive help much more quickly.

Don't feel guilty.

It’s all been said already but this thread has annoyed be with how naive the OP. They ask for food because they know someone somewhere will be gullible enough to send them a tenner instead with the reasoning of “well they never asked for money so they must be serious and it’s only a tenner anyway so why not”. Then they get ten/twenty gullible people doing that and they’ve earned a nice couple of hundred quid for a troll post.

Next time you see a thread like that, watch how they ignore the genuine offers of dropping something by or meeting up (if anyone is that stupid to risk their safety like that) or the genuine advice on how the person can be fed or where they can get support. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they’ll be replying to private messages and accepting offers of £10 through PayPal from multiple gullible people. If they do that on a few sites, they make quite a bit of money.

MNHQ do a good job of deleting them. If a person is too dumb to keep themselves safe from scams online, at least MNHQ is doing the job for them!

But people should rightly be prevented from asking strangers on the internet to place an online food order for them.

I can’t work out why you don’t understand that there are better, more sustainable ways to support vulnerable people than that.

@ UnaMujer people who defend these scammers so aggressively make me suspicious. I’m not talking about people who just comment that “it could be genuine,” or “I might give something,” but people like the OP who become incredibly aggressive, start name calling etc as she did upthread. It was the same on the tour guide thread the other week, and it makes me think that either they, or someone they know, have made money that way.

@ TheWildRumpyPumpus oh god yes I remember her. And CVQ, and the MN Christmas thing was cancelled because there were too many opportunists.

And to the gullible thinking that MN would delete a thread of someone purely for asking for food, get real. People don’t need handouts from strangers to get help. We don’t have the kind of poverty in this country that people have no choice but to go begging from strangers on the internet. Not if they have access to the internet anyway.

Op there are some very genuine people in the world that need help, walk around you'll see them, if you want to help volunteer where it matters help someone in your local community. Sadly there are plenty of unscrupulous people who prey on the goodwill of people like yourself. You wanted to do a good thing but the op wasn't being truthful hence why MNHQ deleted and banned.

You are lovely @Byallmeans. I didn't see the original post. How awful that someone needing food, got their thread deleted instead. I suppose mumsnet hq may have seen many opportunists, unfortunately who's sole intention is to beg for money. Youd be surprised how many have privately messaged posters and sent money over. In their eyes, they're protecting people from being taken advantage of.

Just wanted to add info about food banks - I’d hate anyone reading this thread to think they were difficult to access. I’m on the management committee of our local Trussel Trust foodbank. I’m not aware of a single council run foodbank either in our region or nationally (there are of course a host of independent food banks, but the Trussel Trust is the biggest organisation )

For a Trussel Trust food bank, clients are supposed to have a referral voucher but for example in our county, there are almost 70 different organisations who can issue vouchers. If a client rings us up, we can direct them to an organisation that can issue a voucher that same day. The Trussel Trust has been encouraging referral agencies to do E-referrals where clients can be emailed the referral voucher. This has grown massively for us locally over the pandemic and for those agencies/clients who can’t do this, we’ve brought in a system of telephone referrals ( obviously I don’t know if all Trussel Trust food banks do this).
While we certainly don’t encourage people to just turn up at the foodbank, if someone does, they are not turned away empty handed We would explain how to get a voucher but also given them a bag or two of essentials to get them through until they did.

The reason we are so keen on referrals is not to make the service hard to access. It’s because as well as fixing the immediate problem of hunger, we’re also a campaigning organisation trying to address the causes. So we want clients to be engaging with local charities/support organisations - and we also want all the data we collect on the referral form so we have reliable figures on the levels of need that we can use in campaigning.

Sorry - that is all a bit garbled

Anyone been here long enough to remember TheWiltedRose? I think she brought about the origin of MN’s ‘warning message’ that we get now. That escalated from needing basic things to ever more extravagant requests - being paypalled money by users I believe - quite a mess.

The OP of that thread has posted more than once asking for food, they didn't want any other suggestions made. For the 1 who sends food there are 10 others who send money. Then we get swamped by sob stories.

Let it go and be thankful you didn't get conned. These people rarely get deleted without good reason.

People can ask for help. Mumsnet is a forum, not a food bank.

If you don’t like the rules, set up your own forum that connects people with others willing to help.

They didn’t ask for any money - just food. And you really think that when you got in touch they would give you the address and ask you to drop off the food for them? Really? No they would likely ask you for the money to pay for it, and even if they didn’t, they know that there are people who would assume that if they couldn’t afford to eat then they couldn’t afford other things, and would offer them money.