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JustGiving: is the FCA really regulating what appears to be outright £31 million pound deception?

By Tom Winnifrith | Monday 22 January 2024


 


My daughter Olaf is doing a charity swim on January 27 outside on Parliament Hill in London to raise money for the homeless charity Crisis. Well done to the little Trustafarian (mother’s side) and I have made a small donation. You too can do so HERE if you wish. I see that my pal Evil Banksta has already donated a small amount of the money made for him by Adam Reynolds and the blunderers at Belluscura (BELL). Thanks again Adam you are a supporting so much. But then the platform Just Giving tried to stiff me with a £3 donation to it on top of the score that I had donated. This really stinks.

The message flashed up:

Review your donation below. We don't charge a platform fee, so we've added a tip to JustGiving. Your tip will be used to maintain the technology that keeps our site running 24/7, provide top notch customer service and give everyone the best possible experience with JustGiving.

And another one said

JustGiving won't be charging a platform fee to the charity. Adding a small tip on top of your donation means we can continue to help more people.

There was a slider which allowed me to reduce the “tip” to £2 but I was forced to pay that amount. Will that cash all go to allowing JustGiving to help more people? No that is grotesquely misleading and something that the FCA, which regulates JustGiving, should be addressing at once.

At Companies House the Justgiving.com Foundation described in its last annual report what it does, help charities raise money. It appears to make no profit and has no income so where are all those £2 and £3 “tips” going? It seems that the admin costs of the charity are paid for by Giving.com.Limited.

Its 2022 annual report says that it “traded as JustGiving” except it did not really, it supported Just Giving according to its own annual report. It also shows that the company reported a pretax profit of £24.8 million, on turnover of £53.2 million and paid a dividend of £31million. The annual report states clearly that charities have to pay for card processing etc. So that £2 or £3 is 100 pure gross profit for JustGiving. Its biggest cost ( staff) was £10.6 million. The company spent less than a million quid on R&D to keep its site top notch.

I would argue that a company using my £2 to fund a £31 million dividend really is not doing what it says on the tin with regard to that £2 and all the other “tips” folks are FORCED to make. But the whole operation is regulated by the FCA so it cannot be misleading donors can it?




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