Go Fund Me vs PayPal: Alaska lawsuit spotlights consent disputes in fundraising

Alaska Attorney General Stephen Cox has filed lawsuits against six fundraising and charity-related platforms, including GoFundMe and PayPal Inc., over online donation pages created for nonprofits without their knowledge or consent. For go fund me and its peers, the central question is the same: how does the state’s case compare across platforms when the alleged conduct, scale, and harms are placed side by side?

Stephen Cox’s lawsuits target six platforms, one alleged practice

Cox announced Tuesday that Alaska filed lawsuits naming GoFundMe, PayPal Inc., Charity Navigator, JustGiving, Pledgeto, and Network for Good. The state accuses the platforms of using publicly available information to generate online donation pages for nonprofits, then soliciting contributions through those pages without first obtaining permission from the charities.

The attorney general’s office described the practice as broad in scope, alleging that fundraising pages were generated for more than 1 million nonprofits nationwide, including several thousand in Alaska. State the investigation began after Alaska nonprofits started reporting suspicious fundraising pages appearing online without their involvement, and investigators later found similar pages on multiple platforms.

State attorneys argue nonprofits have a right to control fundraising in their name, including fundraising strategies, the vendors and platforms they partner with, and how they manage donor relationships. Alaska also alleges that unauthorized pages can collect fees, display outdated or inaccurate information, compete with a nonprofit’s own campaigns, or prevent the organization from knowing who donated and when.

GoFundMe and PayPal in the Alaska complaint: scale and function as key contrasts

The context provided by state officials includes the most detailed figures for GoFundMe. The attorney general’s office said GoFundMe created 1. 4 million functional charity pages in fall 2025 that allowed donations. Cox’s office also said GoFundMe may have created unauthorized pages for as many as 5, 000 Alaska-based charities, often without the nonprofits’ knowledge.

By contrast, the information in the announcement does not attach the same kind of platform-specific counts to PayPal Inc. Still, PayPal is named alongside the other defendants, and investigators said they found unauthorized pages on multiple sites with active donation buttons where donors could donate to a charity without the charity having any knowledge that the pages were created for them. In that framing, the state’s core allegation—unauthorized solicitation under a charity’s name—applies equally across the list, even as the publicly stated level of detail differs from platform to platform.

Cox also cast the alleged harm in donor-facing terms: “Generosity depends on trust, ” he said. He added that some Alaskans may have donated believing they were supporting a specific charity even though the organization did not authorize the page and “may never have received the donation — or may have received less than donors intended because of fees. ” That risk, as described, is not limited to one defendant; it is the state’s explanation for why the practice matters across the entire ecosystem of donation pages.

Go Fund Me compared with the other defendants: what Alaska’s case emphasizes

Placed next to each other, the cases against GoFundMe and the other platforms read less like different theories and more like a single theory applied across multiple services: Alaska says the platforms created pages in a charity’s name first, then solicited donations, without prior consent. The state says that violates Alaska’s Charitable Solicitations Act, which it says requires fundraisers to obtain consent before raising money for a charity, as well as the Alaska Consumer Protection Act.

Where the comparison becomes revealing is in what Alaska chose to quantify. The state singled out GoFundMe with specific numbers—1. 4 million functional charity pages created in fall 2025 and up to 5, 000 Alaska-based charities potentially affected—while describing the other platforms in broader terms as having engaged in “similar conduct. ” That difference in detail does not, by itself, establish a difference in legal exposure, but it does suggest how Alaska is trying to ground its broader claims in a concrete example.

Analysis: The side-by-side picture indicates Alaska’s primary dividing line is not between one company and another, but between a model where platforms generate charity pages from public information and the state’s view that charities must opt in before anyone raises money in their name. The lawsuits also highlight a practical difference: GoFundMe is the defendant tied to the clearest scale claims in Alaska’s public description, which may shape how the state explains impact even while pursuing a shared legal theory across all six.

The next confirmed test of that finding is the litigation itself, as the state’s allegations under Alaska’s Charitable Solicitations Act and Alaska Consumer Protection Act are applied to GoFundMe, PayPal Inc., and the other named defendants. If Alaska maintains its focus on consent and donor trust, the comparison suggests the court fight will turn less on branding and more on whether the platforms’ page-creation approach fits the state’s consent requirements.