A man’s huge mistake paid off big in the end.
On May 26, Redditor u/lazybear90 posted an almost-unbelievable story on the r/TIFU subreddit, which has since gone viral. In it, the California resident details an experience donating to a charity on GoFundMe that went sideways in a grand way. A few grand, actually.
“This happened in February of last year, but my friends have been telling me I need to post this story online … so here goes nothing,” wrote the Reddit user, who asked to be referred to by only his first name, Michael.
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“My wife and I (both 31 years old, at the time) moved into a new three-unit apartment building in San Francisco,” Michael wrote, adding that one of their neighbors is a retired veteran in his 70s who is also a devout Hindu priest. One day, Michael ran into his neighbor, who tells him about a hunger charity he manages for a community in Bangladesh. “I wanted to support my neighbor and the charity.”
Michael said that the next day at work, he went to the GoFundMe page for the charity, one named “Urgent Food Relief Needed: Bangladesh” and donated $150. “Or so I thought,” he wrote.
“Moments later, I get a text on my phone warning me of an unusually large transaction on my credit card,” Michael wrote. “I’m confused and swipe to open the text message. It says I have made a payment of $15,041 to GoFundMe. Immediately I’m sweating. How could I have donated FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS?”
Michael said he then retraced his steps, finding out that he didn’t leave the donation amount window when he thought he did, typing the numbers 4 and 1 in addition to his intended donation. “It seems I had accidentally started typing my credit card information while my cursor was still in the donation box, and just like that 150 became 15041. Yikes,” he wrote.
After some panicked moments, a call to GoFundMe’s customer support secured him a refund, he said, but he was informed it would be processed in three to seven business days and that the charity organizer would be able to see his donation until then. “I tell him that’s a big problem, as the entire GoFundMe had hardly raised that much at that point. Surely they will notice their fundraiser doubling overnight?” he wrote. And he was right.
Michael said he had planned on explaining what happened to his neighbor, the GoFundMe organizer, as soon as he could, but he had a rude awakening the next morning.
“I looked at my phone and saw I had 40+ notifications on Facebook. Someone had sent me a friend request, had liked many of my old posts, and had sent me many messages,” Michael wrote. “Immediately I was concerned when I saw that the individual messaging me had a Hindu name, but I never could have imagined what I saw when I opened his first message…”
“The man had sent me a video of himself from Bangladesh, surrounded by dozens of impoverished and hungry people holding bags of food, thanking me BY NAME (Michael) for my generous donation,” Michael continued, adding that the people in the video then give him a round of applause. “At this point, I’ve leapt out of my bed and I’m pacing. Part of me wants to scream, part of me wants to crack up laughing.”
Michael said the man, who runs operations for the charity in Bangladesh, sent multiple pictures of people thanking him for his five-figure donation, and to prove it links to the images themselves. “Literally hundreds of photos of frail, elderly, disabled, and malnourished individuals holding signs with my name,” Michael wrote.
Michael said that he ended up donating $1,500 once the original donation was refunded, feeling guilty about the chaos his mistake caused.
“The charity’s host was incredibly gracious and understanding, and he explained to me that $1,500 goes very far in Bangladesh for urgent food relief,” Michael wrote. “Ultimately I think the whole experience was a win-win. I helped a great cause, and I got a funny story out of it.”
But the story doesn’t end there. Thanks to the power of the internet — and Michael’s smart decision to link to a second GoFundMe for the same charity, titled “Urgent Food Relief & Assistance in Bangladesh” — something spectacular happened.
People from Reddit moved by the story donated to the fundraiser and let the organizer, Jeff Dunan (also Vasanta Dasa), know that the Reddit post brought them there. (Dunan did not respond to a request for comment from TODAY.com.)
“Heard the story of the guy on reddit who accidentally donated 15,000 instead of 150, but bumped it up to 1500. Great story, wanted to do my part,” wrote one participant who donated $100. That person is one of more than 3,700 contributors to the fundraiser, with some donating amounts as high as $5,000.
“Two weeks ago, a donor’s story went viral online, bringing our GoFundMe to over 2,800 amazing new donors from across the planet. Result: doors that were closed to us before are now opened. Resources which were out of reach are now available,” wrote Dunan in a June 10 GoFundMe update. “This new capacity enables us to bring more food to more people more often.”
Additionally, popular YouTube channel Smosh Pit presented the story on June 18 as part of its series “Reading Reddit Stories,” which drove even more donations to the charity.
Many people commented on the GoFundMe that they “heard about it on Smosh,” and at the time of this writing, the fundraiser has over $118,000 in donations.
For Michael, the virality of his extremely expensive mistake came as a shock.
“When I posted the whole story online, I never, ever anticipated that it would blow up the way that it did,” he tells TODAY.com. “I remember when it got 100 upvotes on Reddit, I called my neighbor and was like, ‘Hey, Jeff, you might see some donations trickling in. People seem to be enjoying the story on Reddit.’ And sure enough, he called me an hour later and said, ‘Five people donated,’ and we were excited about that.”
Michael later posted an update to Reddit detailing the impact his post had on the charity. He said that before his post, the charity had approximately $12,500 from 26 total donations. “My neighbor, the organizer of the charity, had told me the charity was running on fumes and looking to cancel some of its programs,” he wrote.
But now, thanks to the Reddit community, as well as others across the internet, the charity has received much more money than Michael had to take back. “We are still stunned by the influx of support from each of you. We are humbled by the confidence shown by you,” Dunan wrote in a June 21 update.
Michael says he has received so many messages of support, both from Redditors who read his story and from the charity organizers, who have sent updated images saying “Thanks Reddit.”
“The guilty feeling never quite went away when the donation went from $15,000 to $1,500 — but it certainly has now,” Michael says. “The online community more than covered for me and now I feel so proud of this whole story.”
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY
