Most people frankly went out of their way to assuage that concern with their initial e-mail to me. And even if one or two wasn't 100% legitimate... I'm OK with that "hit rate". Helping those truly in need makes those necessary mistakes worth it.
A while back I spent some time working with homelessness charities in Australia as part of a corporate sponsorship. It was, to say the least, enlightening.
Australia has a very robust framework for dealing with homelessness and so a much deeper understanding than a lot of countries.
I used to have this perception that you had to be on drugs, etc to end up homeless and it's just not true. There is such a broad set of circumstances that can lead to homelessness and for women in particular the leading cause is domestic violence.
But not having a support network around you (or if you have some then it's couchsurfing, which is a form of homelessness), is very easy. Plenty of people don't have strong support networks to fall back on.
Scammers exist, but we can't let that stop us from helping the many many people that need support (even more with the cost of living crisis).
Maybe it would be useful to have some kind of organization where people down on their luck but truly through no major fault of their own could anonymously register and receive some assistance. I think more people would be more generous if they didn’t think it was largely going to scammers.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t help everyone, just saying that it would be probably much easier to get more support for this.
If a person was out to scam people by looking for handouts that they don’t need, the last place they would be prowling would probably be a message board for individualist tech entrepeneurs and wage worker technologists who don’t believe that it’s possible to make less than 80K USD as a programmer (stereotypes).
It's weird to me that I like to think of myself as a positive person but come up with that sort of thing.