To be absolutely FUMING with Gofundme?

[AmIReadingThisCorrectly]

This thread will possibly out me in real life but tbh I'm so angry I don't really care!

I have been helping a family member with raising funds for a really good cause and yesterday we reached our target (c. £7000). However my relative who is admin in the GFM page got a phone call from someone who had donated a 3-figure sum to say that the payment had been taken from her account twice. Family member helped to investigate and it turns out that Stripe (the payment admin company, kind of like PayPal is to EBay) had taken the payment twice but only allocated one to the fund, leaving the other in limbo somewhere. The lady (quite rightly) raised a dispute with her bank who have chased GFM for the money, and GFM have taken 2x her donation away from the fund (even though only 1 was credited), meaning it is over £1000 down.

My relative has contacted GFM who refuse to speak via phone, and has given them all the proof that the payment only went in once. However GFM will only consider this evidence if it's submitted via a specific claim form, which my relative cannot complete as within the form you have to highlight the duplicate payments from your fund, which they are unable to do as they only received one. So basically GFM have got us over a barrel ???? we have threatened media and legal involvement due to the fact that hundreds of pounds worth of other people's donations have now been taken away plus to make matters worse the account has been suspended and over £500 of pending payments will not now go through to the fund. So from reaching the target, we are now over £1500 down and are not allowed to use the page to raise any more money due to no fault of our own. GFM are also messaging donators telling them that the account has been suspended due to "suspicious activity" which is also not helping our cause!

Has anyone got any experience of this and any advice on what we can do? Thanks in advance.

OK. Reading it again it sounds like your fury is making you think this is more complicated than it is.

Donator = donated X amount, has statement that shows actually paid Xx2. So just use that! And show the statement with the refund, and your corresponding paperwork that shows on your end there is just one allocation of the funds.

API errors are a pain but it sounds like a nontypical situation so just fill in their form as best you can and give the additional information above ^

Assuming they use reference numbers when taking payments it will flag up eventually but hurry them along and just fill out the form.

blues donor is anonymous and wishes to stay so, therefore no way of accessing their bank statements not letting them know their original payment has been deducted as well as the duplicate. Noeuf no, the original payment was a few weeks ago. And Life they have to do an interactive thing where they have to select the two transactions from their GFM statement but as thereMs only 1 transaction on there, they can't select 2 and are therefore stuck. No point selecting something unrelated as GFM will either get the wrong end of the stick (again!) or accuse them of wrongdoing (again!). So no way of getting into the complaints system and getting someone at GFM to look at it officially.

Can you contact stripe and ask them to release the second payment to the gfm account?

Noeuf apparently Stripe can only be contacted via GFM but I agree it's worth a try. However it would still leave us minus the original donation with the donor still unaware that their donation hasn't been counted.

stripe.com/help/dispute-types
Have you found this? It seems to be a user manual for stripe and I've linked to the bit about disputing duplicate payments - it's from the provider not the customer view.

Ah I see. In that case I agree with contacting Stripe. They're generally pretty quick to help resolve these types of issues.

Be sure to tell them the date and the time of the transaction if you can see it, and any other details about the customer if you have them (appreciate it might be limited if it's come through as anonymous) because when I go through our stripe system, I can see spot customer api "keys" being duplicated if I have a good reference for date and time.

support.gofundme.com/hc/en-us/articles/203604394-Stripe-Fees-UK-Accounts- looking at this, whoever setup/owns the GoFundMe campaign (your relative?) will be the account holder for the stripe account associated for the gofundme project. So you're in a better position to be able to contact them, say, hey - this is my email address - please help me sort this out with someone who donated to my account.

support.stripe.com/email?skip_login=true

Choose the third option and fully explain your situation

They've always got back to me within 24 hours