The Authority, at the meeting of Sunday, March 22, 2020, ordered a interim measure against the www.gofundme.com website, which operates a platform through which funds can be raised for charitable purposes (crowdfunding).

The reason for the measure is the need to stop the spread of an extremely serious practice, with the Authority’s intervention thus both urgent and unavoidable.

The site promotes the possibility of making donations, many of which are currently made to hospitals and hospital wards in the areas most affected by the Coronavirus emergency, free of charge and without any cost to the donor. Yet, in actual fact, there are costs associated with credit and debit card transactions. In addition, the Platform allows consumers to pay optional commissions on each transaction to finance the running of the site; however, when making the donation, the commission is pre-set at a value equal to a percentage share of the donated amount. Consumers can only cancel this by clicking on "Other" in an adjacent drop-down menu and entering zero.

The Authority found that the means of acquiring commissions advertised as optional is likely to exert undue influence on donors, who may be unaware of the possibility of changing or cancelling the amount set by the platform, or consider it necessary for its operation. This seems particularly insidious given the purpose for which consumers use GoFundMe, i.e. making donations to charity, which entails the paying of less attention to the site’s operating mechanisms and/or a greater likelihood of using financial resources.

The Authority has ordered that the pre-selection mechanism of the optional commission be removed immediately, leaving donors full freedom of choice through the indication of "zero" as a value that can then be changed.

The Authority, in view of the unique current circumstances, is continuing to focus its attention on operators active on the e-commerce market who adopt unfair and misleading behaviour.

Rome, 22 March 2020