An interactive case · a game and three chapters
The Shade Job
Riverside Food Bank never set up a donation page anywhere but its own site. Play it first: you have 60 days and a letter cannon to take back a city of doors that collect gifts in your name while your donors walk past. Then follow those donors through the street, the money and the missing donor file.
The Shade Job
Shadow platforms put the charity's name on their own doors. Donors who walk in leave their money and their names in different buildings, and the charity has to go to each one to get them back.
3D is not available on this device
The interactive version needs WebGL. Everything it shows is written out below.
What the game and the chapters show
Riverside Food Bank is a stand-in. Platforms A, B and C are composites; each follows a pattern documented for real platforms in the register and uses that platform’s published fees and terms.
The game: just opt out
Ask a platform why a charity has a page it never set up, and the answer is to write in. The register lists 8 platforms that make these pages. 5 take the page down when asked. 2 leave something up. One publishes no way to ask at all. Each takes its own letter and its own proof that you speak for the charity, and the list only grows.
In the game you get 60 days and a letter cannon. Donors walk down the avenue toward the food bank, and every open door can pull one in; the more doors you take down, the more donors reach you. Every request waits through a three-day verification, some bounce because the email came from outside the charity’s domain, and two funds hold the money and donor names already given in your name until you enroll or register with each one.
- RoundUp.org Removed Email. Verified within 3 business days, removed within 3 more. Money already paid out stays paid out.
- Donate.gg Removed Email from an authorized representative. The route is in its developer docs, not on its main site.
- Network for Good Removed Email. Removed within 3 business days after it verifies the request.
- Pledge Removed Email. Its terms say it will remove any charity that asks.
- PayPal Giving Fund Removed Web form with your name, email, phone and EIN. Removal also covers its partner platforms.
- GreatNonprofits Still up Email. It turns off the Donate button. The profile stays up.
- JustGiving Still up Support ticket citing article 193540. Covers removal from its search only, not the page.
- GiveFreely No route No removal route published. A general inbox is the only contact.
Opting out works for one platform. It cannot keep up with a street that keeps adding them. The fix runs the other way: no page takes a gift in a charity’s name until the charity says yes. See the principles, or find your organization in the register; each platform’s page carries its removal request.
Removal routes as each platform published them, checked September 25, 2026. In the 3D city, gift sizes, giving rates, how fast new doors rise, the 1-in-5 rejection odds and the 1-in-6 chance a support inbox never replies are made up; no one publishes how many of these platforms exist. The verification wait and payout rules follow the platforms’ published terms.
1. The street
Three platforms put the food bank’s name on their own doors and rank above its real page. A donor who walks in leaves the gift in one building and their name in another, and the food bank has to go to each one to get them back. Donors are sorted by search position using First Page Sage’s blended organic click-through rates for positions 1–4 (7.1%, 3.0%, 1.7%, 1.1%; report of September 22, 2026), counting only results that carry the charity’s name. That is a position-only model; there is no data on where real donors click.
The two funds are real kinds of intermediary. A pass-through giving fund sends a charity that never enrolled a check with no donor names. A donor-advised fund owns the gift and grants it on; a charity with no account gets either a mailed check with no donor details or a letter saying funds are waiting and it must sign up to collect them.
2. Follow the money
The fees come off at once. The food bank’s share does not arrive for weeks. A pass-through giving fund “typically grants funds to recommended charities within 15-45 days,” or within 90 if the charity never enrolled. A donor-advised fund grants “within thirty (30) days after the end of the month in which the donation was made”: about day 45 for a gift made mid-month. A crypto platform that holds gifts until the charity writes in publishes no date at all.
3. The missing file
The money can arrive without the donor. Across the ten real platforms checked, one PayPal Giving Fund enrollment reaches the donor data for three; the other seven each need their own sign-up, and none documents giving donor data to a charity that has not claimed or enrolled.