Strangers are giving strangers money for strange things at an alarming rate, and that might not be a good thing. FIVE BILLION DOLLARS. That's the amount of money regular people had removed from their bank accounts and given to crowdfunding campaigns as of the end of 2013. Five b-b-billion, a $3.5 billion increase from two years earlier. And what's amazing isn't just the raw number or the exponential upward trend. What's amazing about the evolution of crowdfunding-the process by which people ask strangers for money to help fund a project, but the strangers only have to pay if all the money is raised-is the asininity, dubiousness, and sometimes even fraudulence of some of the projects. Let's take a look, shall we, at Esther the Wonder Pig, the poster beast of crowdfunding frivolity. Two Canadian guys adopted her a couple of years ago, thinking they were getting a mini pig. She ballooned to 533 pounds. They couldn't bear to lose her-she had led them to an epiphany about animal welfare or something-so they went vegan and launched an Indiegogo campaign to build a farm sanctuary for Esther and other would-be ham sandwiches. By July they had surpassed their $375,000 funding goal.
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