{"id":42860,"date":"2025-11-10T04:56:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T04:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/42860\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T04:56:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T04:56:09","slug":"san-antonio-pets-alive-warns-of-unauthorized-gofundme-page-calls-it-misleading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/42860\/","title":{"rendered":"San Antonio Pets Alive! warns of unauthorized GoFundMe page, calls it \u2018misleading\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN ANTONIO \u2013 A local nonprofit is one of many<\/a> that is speaking up against GoFundMe. <\/p>\n

San Antonio Pets Alive! said GoFundMe created a donation page for the nonprofit organization without their permission. <\/p>\n

Bob Citrullo, the Executive Director for San Antonio Pets Alive! said he\u2019s worried it\u2019s a scam and is calling on GoFundMe to fix it.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery dollar is vital to take care of these animals that we\u2019re saving their lives,\u201d Citrullo said. <\/p>\n

Citrullo said he was shocked when he saw San Antonio Pets Alive! on GoFundMe. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you see something like this and then people donate to it, and then they find out it\u2019s a scam… we didn\u2019t do it, but if I was a donor, I\u2019d be very curious,\u201d Citrullo said. \u201cI\u2019d be concerned as to how I would donate in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month, the popular online fundraising platform created more than 1.4 million donation pages for organizations that are registered nonprofits in the U.S.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was supposed to raise awareness to donors about these organizations, but the problem is that it has to be approved through the organization to do that, and so it\u2019s very misleading,\u201d Citrullo said.<\/p>\n

Citrullo and his team found several GoFundMe pages that said they were benefiting San Antonio Pets Alive! on their website.<\/p>\n

Those pages raised more than $1,300. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t access the money,\u201d Citrullo said. \u201cWhat I really would like to see is the money be returned to the donors, and then they donate through our legitimate way, through our website.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement to KSAT 12, a spokesperson for GoFundMe said on Friday the page for San Antonio Pets Alive! has since been removed from their website. <\/p>\n

They also said all donations that were previously collected for the nonprofit have been delivered directly to the nonprofit through the Paypal Giving Fund. <\/p>\n

\u201cAnybody wanting to make a donation, just be very careful, really look at where you\u2019re donating and honestly go to the organization\u2019s website,\u201d Citrullo said. <\/p>\n

San Antonio Pets Alive! advises the public they only accept donations through their website at San Antonio Pets Alive.org<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Read GoFundMe\u2019s full statement to KSAT 12 below. <\/p>\n

\u201cAt GoFundMe, our mission is to help people help each other. This mission extends to every nonprofit: we strive to connect nonprofits with new donors, empower supporters to give and fundraise, and enable communities to rally behind the causes they care about.<\/p>\n

We understand clearly that our recent efforts with Nonprofit Pages have caused concern, and we are fully committed to rebuilding trust through action.<\/p>\n

After hearing from our community, we made the following changes:<\/p>\n

Nonprofit Pages are now opt-in only: Only nonprofits that choose to opt in and complete the verification process will have a public, searchable Nonprofit Page on GoFundMe.<\/p>\n

Nonprofit Pages that were not claimed as of a couple weeks ago have been removed and de-indexed, so they will no longer appear in search engine results.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nonprofit directory listings will continue: As we have for many years, we will maintain basic nonprofit directory listings so nonprofits remain discoverable and organizers can create fundraisers to support them.<\/p>\n

Our team has been in touch with the team at San Antonio Pets Alive both via email and by phone. I can confirm that not only has their Nonprofit Page been removed and de-indexed, but their basic directory listing page has also been completely deleted from our platform per their request. This means that people on GoFundMe will not be able to find or fundraise on behalf of their organization.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Donations from all previous fundraisers for San Antonio Pets Alive on GoFundMe have been delivered directly to the organization through our partners at Paypal Giving Fund, which our team has also communicated to San Antonio Pets Alive.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re committed to supporting nonprofits, and do our best to ensure all funds raised for any nonprofit are delivered promptly to them.”<\/p>\n

GoFundMe spokesperson<\/p>\n

Read more: <\/p>\n

Copyright 2025 by KSAT – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN ANTONIO \u2013 A local nonprofit is one of many that is speaking up against GoFundMe. San Antonio…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2097,82,84,83,25493],"class_list":["post-42860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-nonprofit","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news","tag-san-antonio-pets-alive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}