It's normal for crowd-funding campaigns to get a late bump, but the late surge in the gawker campaign is sort of interesting: I'm pretty sure that prior to last night, that $10,000 prize was unclaimed, which means that sometime in the last 12 hours, a single donor pledged $10,000 or more, despite the warning about the source being out of touch. Another pledge of $2,000 just a couple hours ago. There's some serious money flying around, it's not just a bunch of $25 donations.
All of this despite Gawker releasing another update this morning that they still have had no further contact with the source.
Total conspiracy theory here, but it would make sense that if the Ford office believed that a video did not exist or that the video had no chance of surfacing, they would pledge the money to make the funding goal succeed, so that the fact that the transaction does not happen despite the money being there, boosts their argument that the tape doesn't exist.
Another theory is that some addiction-related charity has figured out that they're in good shape to get some or all of the $200,000 if the campaign is funded but the transaction can't be completed, so they or their supporters are making sure it succeeds.
Or, someone's just got $10,000 to burn.
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