Six online crowdfunding platforms are being sued by the state of Alaska for allegedly creating donation pages for charities without their knowledge or consent.
The lawsuits against GoFundMe, Pay Pal Inc., Charity Navigator, Just Giving, Pledge, and Network for Good were filed on March 10, by Alaska Attorney General Stephen Cox. The lawsuits allege that all six websites used publicly available data to generate fundraising pages for over 1 million nonprofits, including several thousand in Alaska, and then solicited donations through those pages without first getting permission from the charities themselves.
Cox contends that GoFundMe and the other platforms used nonprofits’ good names to solicit donations without coordinating with the organizations’ actually doing the charitable work.
“That means some Alaskans may have donated thinking they were supporting a specific charity, when the charity never authorized the page and may never have received the donation – or may have received less than donors intended because of fees,” Cox said. “Alaska law is clear: If you’re going to raise money in a charity’s name, you must first get the charity’s consent.”
According to the Alaska Department of Law, GoFundMe in the fall of 2025 created 1.4 million functional pages for different charities that allowed individuals to make donations, some unauthorized, for as many as 5,000 Alaska-based charities in most cases without their knowledge. The Chartable Solicitations Act requires solicitors to obtain consent before fundraising on behalf of a charity.
The litigation is seeking court orders requiring the companies to remove any unauthorized donation pages for Alaska charities along with civil penalties for each violation of the state’s Unfair Trade Practices and Chartable Solicitations Acts.
