Why are people donating millions of dollars to ridiculous wall-related GoFundMe campaigns?

GoFundMe users are throwing around lots of cash on increasingly ridiculous border wall-related campaigns.

It all started on Sunday when Brian Kolfage launched a page on the crowdfunding platform calling for Trump supporters to bypass Congress and just raise money to build Trump's wall themselves. The goal? Oh, just $1 billion. In less than a week, more than $12.6 million has been raised, with one big-spending user apparently donating $50,000.

Since that campaign started to gain traction, two competing pages have popped up, including one looking to raise $100 million to provide migrants with ladders to get over the wall. It launched Wednesday and has raised more than $89,000. But ladders might not even be required if another GoFundMe page is successful: User Luke O'Neil is looking to raise $200 million to build — wait for it — a "series of giant escalators" over the wall.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

If this all sounds too ridiculous to be true, that's because it is. Both pages are fairly tongue-in-cheek and specify that the funds raised will actually go toward a nonprofit group that provides education and legal services to refugees and immigrants.

As for the millions being raised on the original GoFundMe page to pay for the wall (which President Trump repeatedly promised would be paid for by Mexico), any money donated to the U.S. government actually just goes into a fund for "general use" and wouldn't be designated for any particular purpose, Business Insider reports, although the page's founder insists he has an in with the White House to get around that, per NBC News. More than likely, all the people who have donated to this campaign would just be giving the federal government free cash to use on anything but building a wall, which would cost about 21 times the page's goal ridiculously lofty goal anyway.