Please take a moment to review this important message regarding auction items for your fundraiser.
Charity Fundraising is committed to providing premium auction items for our fundraising partners around the world. For the past 6 years, part of this commitment has included launching Exclusive Limited Edition Auction Items via our email platform. As our business has grown and demand for our auction items has increased exponentially, it has become apparent we must establish rules and protocols to help better serve our fundraising partners.
Yesterday on February 12, Charity Fundraising was scheduled to launch Exclusive Limited Edition Auction Items of Michael Jordan and LeBron James at 11 am Eastern Time. Unfortunately, due to an unanticipated delay, the auction items launched late at 11:26 am Eastern Time instead. We understand your time is valuable and waiting nearly half an hour to receive an email is unacceptable. We are committed to ensuring a delay like this does not happen again in the future.
Just after 10:30 am Eastern Time on Tuesday, our internal cyber security team discovered a cache of bots and malicious scripts that appeared to have been set upon our site by some tech-savvy individuals. We believe these bad actors recognized there were ways to attempt to speed up their checkout, providing them with an unfair advantage in reserving Exclusive Limited Edition Auction Items faster than other interested non-profit organizations. After investigating the issue, our cyber security team found 1,426 legitimate non-profits contacted us to reserve the 46 available auction items, and 50,000+ malicious scripts running to preload our item launch landing page with the information to reserve the auction items prior to its official email launch. Fortunately, our cyber security team was able to block the scripts, remove the bots and cancel any orders from organizations attempting to game the system using these deceptive tactics.
Rules & Protocols To Reserve Limited Edition Charity Auction Items
1. Any individual or organization attempting to use any bots, scripts, formjacking, etc. in order to reserve Exclusive Auction Items earlier than their official release dates and times will be cancelled immediately. Additionally, if that individual or organization already has other auction items reserved with us, we will cancel the entirety of their existing order, as well. That individual or organization will also be permanently banned from reserving auction items from Charity Fundraising.
2. Anyone personally emailing in without receiving the official notification offering an auction item will also have their order cancelled. During this 26 minute delay we had several individuals and organizations send emails stating, “I’ll take it”, “I want the limited item” or “Reserve the limited edition for me” etc. These individuals and organizations, while not obviously responsible for using the bots or scripts discovered on our site were also trying to game the system, and therefore exercised an unfair advantage over other non-profits.
We believe kindness always wins and doing the right thing is always the right thing, so we kindly ask that you play by the rules stated above and behave in a spirit welcoming of the non-profit organization you represent.
We appreciate your understanding, cooperation and support of our mission.
Thank you.
Tha Charity Fundraising Team
