Hands in the Cookie Jar

Hard to resist

Apparently, you can cheat at charity at Berkeley. From SFGATE:

UC Berkeley students get caught faking names, gaming Big Give fundraiser

A few hours before the Big Give deadline, UC Berkeley's director of digital philanthropy sent a mass email where he announced that the jig was up

Alex Shultz, 3-10-23

This week, from 9 p.m. on Wednesday until 9 p.m. on Thursday, UC Berkeley held an online fundraising event called "Big Give," during which students and the assorted Cal community had 24 hours to donate to their favorite school programs, clubs and groups. To further encourage Big Give donations, UC Berkeley pledged to contribute bonus prize money to groups that surpassed certain unique donor benchmarks and goals. As of Friday afternoon, 2023's Big Give totals look quite impressive: $12,210,268 raised from 14,408 donors. Except, those numbers — while not totally off-base — apparently aren't accurate.

A few hours before the Big Give deadline Thursday, UC Berkeley director of digital philanthropy Ryan Lawrence sent a mass email, obtained by SFGATE, where he announced that the jig was up: "A few groups (mostly students) are falsifying donations and submitting inaccurate donor information in order to move up leaderboards and win additional prize money," Lawrence wrote, adding, "This means that even if it appears that your dept/group has won a contest, the prizes might be forfeited, and awarded to the next dept/group in the contest."

SFGATE reached out to UC Berkeley for more information on Big Give-gate. Assistant Vice Chancellor Dan Mogulof obliged, noting in an email response that "there have been attempts to game the system ever since Big Give began nine years ago," but "this is the first time we have seen it to such a large extent." As the donations were flowing in this week, UC Berkeley's "gift processing team alerted us that there were some students making up donor information to increase their standings in the contests," Mogulof wrote. "We then checked the donations coming in and saw names and email addresses that were clearly fake."

One possible example, pinpointed by a sharp-eyed member of the Furries at Berkeley group, is a $69.69 donation from a donor who identified as "Gay Bowser." However, the majority of fake-name donors were not as generous as Gay Bowser; Mogulof says UC Berkeley believes most fake-name offenders gave the minimum amount of $10, and "based on the initial information we have gathered, this activity has had a fairly negligible impact on overall donation numbers." ...

Full story at https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/uc-berkeley-students-caught-gaming-fundraiser-17832776.php.