A Gaza fundraising case is being cited as an example of how traditional payment rails can fail people in crisis, even after money has already been raised.
According to Forbes, Sami Jamal Al-Shannat raised more than £55,000 through GoFundMe for family members caught in the war in Gaza. He expected the hardest part to be over. Instead, after the platform took a 3.9% fee, the remaining funds could not be sent directly into Gaza. Under the platform’s rules, the money had to be transferred to a designated beneficiary living in a supported country, who would then pass it on to his family.
That structure met platform requirements, but it also shifted the final delivery of aid onto personal trust. Sami said the arrangement later broke down in a dispute with his brother-in-law, who had been named as the beneficiary, and that he still has not received the full amount. He described the outcome as more than a financial loss, saying it left his wife and children in an extremely vulnerable position.
“Raising the money is not the problem,” Sami said from a displacement camp in Gaza. “The problem started when we had to rely on somebody else to receive it for us.”
He said he now wants to recover the missing funds and pursue accountability, but finding a lawyer from Gaza is difficult and he lacks the money and network needed to do that. He also plans to keep fundraising because wartime inflation has pushed up the cost of food and other essentials.
GoFundMe did not respond to repeated requests for comment, the report said.
Compliance rules can block delivery even when fundraising succeeds
Sami’s experience points to a wider issue for humanitarian crowdfunding platforms. They must operate within banking rules, sanctions regimes, and anti-money laundering requirements, and those rules can sharply limit where funds are allowed to go.
When people in crisis cannot receive funds directly, organizers often have to use intermediaries. That can move responsibility onto private individuals and create a situation where aid raised in public never fully reaches the intended recipient.
The report said the same bottleneck has affected human rights organizations. Lyudmyla Kozlovska, president of the Open Dialogue Foundation, recalled that PayPal, GoFundMe, and Wise blocked the group’s fundraising appeal for Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion. By using Bitcoin instead, the foundation was able to bypass delays tied to traditional payment systems and deliver emergency humanitarian aid on the second day of the war.
Charities, aid groups, and technology teams have been trying for years to solve the same problem: how to reach people who are outside the traditional financial system. More developers now argue that the current model depends on too many intermediaries, especially when money has to cross borders or reach restricted jurisdictions.
Bitcoin platforms are trying to redesign where trust sits
Michele Morucci, co-founder of Bitcoin crowdfunding platform Geyser, said the central challenge is not simply moving money. It is deciding whom to trust.
“People think the biggest challenge is moving money. It’s not. The biggest challenge is deciding who to trust.”
Donors usually do not know recipients personally, he said, so they rely on platforms, charities, journalists, and community leaders to judge whether a campaign is real. Removing one intermediary only works if there is another credible structure in its place.
Geyser reviews projects before they go live, requiring creators to provide proof of work, team information, and necessary documents. Campaigns that do not meet its credibility standards are not approved.
The platform also works with more than 100 Geyser Field Partners who identify and support projects in communities they know directly. Morucci said those partners have helped deliver 12 million satoshis to community projects, equal to about £5,600, or 0.12 BTC. He also said the model is still new and the data remains limited.
Agora removes the platform from the payment path
Agora uses a different structure. It allows funds to move directly between donors and recipients, while verification comes from organizations and individuals with first-hand knowledge of a project.
Mary Kate, co-founder of the team behind Agora, Soapbox, said donors may not know the person asking for help, but they may know and trust the organization that validates the project.
“This lets us move trust from the project itself to the validator. You may not know the person asking for help, but you may know and trust the organization validating them.”
Under that model, the final choice stays with donors. A project can still be visible without validator backing, while trusted organizations can add context and credibility without becoming the only gatekeepers.
Agora also removes the crowdfunding platform from the payment flow. Donations go straight to wallets controlled by recipients, reducing the risk that money will be held by a platform or passed through another person first.
The report said Bitcoin allows funds to move across borders without platform custody or beneficiary handoffs. Even so, wallet security, access, and exchange-rate risk still matter.
For Mary Kate, the value of that control goes beyond payments.
“We can’t take away your account, we can’t shut down your project, and we can’t take your money,” she said. “For people who are already going through trauma and have very little control in their lives, that can be a huge empowering moment.”
Direct payment does not remove every risk. Projects still need review, donors still need enough information to make informed decisions, and recipients can still misuse funds. Agora is working on making those risks more transparent while giving recipients greater control over money raised in their name.
Sanctions and financial rules can hit legitimate aid flows
The article argues that Sami’s case is not unusual because the underlying issue is broader. Activists, journalists, and humanitarian groups around the world are finding it harder to move legal cross-border funds as financial regulation becomes more complex and sanctions increasingly affect entire jurisdictions rather than only governments.
Femi Longe, global freedom tech strategy lead at the Human Rights Foundation, said these restrictions often end up harming the very people humanitarian support is supposed to reach.
“Traditional crowdfunding platforms are regulated, and moving money across borders requires compliance with anti-money laundering and sanctions rules. The problem is that these rules often end up affecting legitimate opposition groups, nonprofits, and ordinary people rather than the governments they were originally aimed at.”
Femi said even organizations operating legally inside sanctioned countries can struggle to receive donations. Visible financial links can also expose supporters or relatives inside those countries to retaliation.
Kozlovska said the issue now goes beyond administrative friction and has become “transnational financial repression,” where regimes use global anti-money laundering and counter-terror financing rules to cut dissidents off from banking access, including in Western countries.
She cited what the report described as a landmark resolution adopted by the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in July 2026, which recognized transnational financial repression as a systemic threat and called for stronger protection of donor privacy and privacy-preserving digital tools. Kozlovska said Bitcoin payment tools are becoming a necessary lifeline for targeted donors and activists.
Open payment networks do not remove the need for accountability
Political opposition groups, independent journalists, and civil society organizations often depend on international donations to keep operating. When those donations are harder to send or easier to monitor, financial infrastructure itself becomes another source of pressure.
The report does not argue for removing regulation. Public fundraising still needs accountability, transparency, and safeguards against fraud. Every interviewee acknowledged that challenge and none presented a perfect solution.
Femi said the practical goal should be to remove unnecessary intermediaries while preserving oversight.
“If you allow project operators to directly control the wallet receiving funds, I think that is better than the current situation,” he said, adding that verification and monitoring remain essential in any system handling public donations.
Sami’s case, the article said, highlights a structural weakness in humanitarian finance. Systems built around banks, payment processors, and jurisdictional boundaries can struggle when money must reach people living through war, political repression, or humanitarian crisis.
At the same time, no one cited in the story argued that technology alone can solve humanitarian fundraising. Sending funds directly to recipients removes one layer of risk, but it does not guarantee that a project is genuine, that organizers are honest, or that donations will be used for the stated purpose.
“I don’t think Bitcoin solves everything,” Femi said. “You still need systems to verify project creators, and you still need accountability for how funds are used. Those challenges do not disappear just because payments become direct.”
That is also the logic behind the approaches described by Morucci and Mary Kate. Their platforms do not claim to eliminate trust. They are trying to change where trust is placed.
The piece concludes that a new generation of humanitarian crowdfunding is taking shape as something more than a patch for a broken legacy system. Open payment networks can give recipients direct control over funds raised in their name, while decentralized trust networks can help donors decide whom to support. Verification, judgment, and accountability still remain necessary, but this structure is being used to bypass some of the legacy financial and regulatory barriers that block traditional platforms from reaching people most in need.