People have discussed, as I found in an archived topic, just search for "1 cent", 1 cent donations before, and the upshot was it was likely fraudulent activity or a user bug or some unintendend or malicious operation meant to impoverish the poor recipient, or already poor recipient. 🙂
I would like to add that there are people who make 1 cent donations for a (good, useful) reason, or at least, are motivated to do so with reasonable assumptions on their part:
1. People don't know that the PayPal fee structure fiscally punishes the recipient of a 1 cent donation.
2. People hear about "donate a penny, even a penny is not too little, see what a penny can do" etc. donation pitches, and they take them at face value.
3. People WANT TO donate a cent as a microdonation. Micordonations are in vogue, but the donation support, such as made available by PayPal SO FAR does not do this concept justice, or really encourage it in practice. Even though financial institutions can process sub-penny transactions just fine without undue hardship.
4. A donor of any amount, yes, even of a single cent, is a distinct member of the community for tax purposes and for the purposes of demonstrating so-called public support under hte IRS tax code pertaining to (and not only) 501(c)3 nonprofit corporations and private foundations.
5. A penny donor is a separate person for a nonprofit cause to demonstrate broad support for it.
6. A person may derive legitimate material benefits from performing a 1 cent PayPal transaction, for example, using a corporate banking debit card where one gets no-fee use if one makes a certain NUMBER of debit card transactions in a billing period.. Chase is an example of such a banking institution. So, in the case where it suffices to make FIVE ANY AMOUNT debit transactions, bankers like to give the example of buying a stick of gum, etc. But it is far more socially useful and less expensive to make 5 PayPal donations at 1 cent each, using that debit card through PayPal. And the identity of the donating party is disclosed to the recipient, so nothing here is unsavory or exploitive.
Hope this helps. Note that the above has nothing to do with greedy, malicious, dishonest, illegitimate, or scammy uses of PayPal. If you really do not care to receive 1 penny donations, there are ample means of rigging your donation page in such a way as to prevent it. Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation has done so in response to scammers donating 1 cent to test stolen credit cards, but by doing so they have cut off microdonations, as well as eliminated the broad support considerations mentioned above, presumably feeling the trade-off was necessary. Personally, I think they made a philosophial, logical, financial as well as practical mistake.
And, PayPal should be encouraged to restructure its fees in such a way as to enable 1 penny donations in appropriate context, and even sub-penny ones. But that is my own free-market, microdonation-enthusiast philosophy, and I concede that PayPal/eBay being motivated by easy profit may entertain a different view on this. Or, maybe, PayPal/eBay does not think the time has come yet to implement microdonation electronic payment as feasible PayPal reality.
Anyway, since this topic is lodged in the Help: Ask the Community/About Payments area, I am officially asking the community what it thinks about my argument/explantion.
Respectfully,
WhoDoGuru (Not Andrea Petković!)
USA
