Unfortunately, all this has caused some SLers to say they will never donate L$ to an SL-based fundraiser again. There's a better solution:

In recent weeks, there's been a scandal around an SL fundraising drive for a real world medical non-profit. Short version: After a number of SLers made fairly substantial donations, questions arose whether the drive's organizer had actually donated the money. You can read an exhaustive summary on Shopping Cart Disco here , but let me state up front I haven't been able to confirm the allegations made there. I'm not even going to mention the real world non-profit that's now been indirectly and unfairly tainted by this controversy. (I contacted the organization, but haven't received any reply about the alleged donations as yet.)

Only donate to SL fundraisers that are working directly and with the public participation of the real world non-profit. The longest running SL fundraiser, the American Cancer Society's SL Relay for Life, remains the gold standard. The drive has a page on the organization's site, and an American Cancer Society staffer known by his real world name, Jeffrey Montegut, coordinating Linden Dollar donations. Both create real and meaningful transparency and accountability. While almost all established SL users involved with real life charity fundraisers in-world have proven themselves trustworthy and honorable, it only takes one bad actor to undermine the entire fragile social contract. And then all we are left with is what we see here now: Difficult to verify claims and counter-claims over real money made between anonymous Internet users with fake names, and an aftertaste of bad faith and paranoia. (Thereby exposing the limited usefulness of avatar-only identities, but that's a topic for another post.)

I hope to keep blogging about SL fundraisers. For that very reason, I hope they contact the real world organizations they seek to help, and get their official backing, well before a single Linden Dollar changes hands.

Request for readers who want to participate in Comments: Again, as the allegations in the specific recent case haven't been sufficiently confirmed, I'd prefer you didn't mention the names (SL or RL) of the individuals allegedly involved, nor the non-profit organization.