This explanation doesn ' t make sense to me as a programmer . Once the placeholder reaches the goal , do they stop accepting donations ? Why would they do that if the placeholder is fake and they might not have truly reached the goal ? What if the fake rate of increase they chose was too high and they still need more money ? If OP ' s post is true , I believe this is funded by someone and they don ' t care whether actual people donate or not , the recount will happen . edit I really doubt they are reading this forum so I ' ll start my own tracking in a public Google spreadsheet 0 w unix timestamps . This should be easy to verify in ~ 24 hours . second edit either OP ' s source was wrong or they changed the tracker . The amounts look like more organic now .