Pretty much nobody has escaped the occasional e-begging that Wikipedia engages in, as from time to time they plaster every single page with a big banner begging for donations, "in order to keep Wikipedia independent", in other words, so that it can run on its own without being owned by some big private megacorporation with its own vested interests.
And, indeed, running the servers is not cheap. Millions and millions of people access Wikipedia every minute. The amount of data that Wikipedia needs to serve is staggering. According to their own financial reports (which are public by law because Wikipedia is a non-profit), it costs about 3 to 4 million US dollars a year to run the servers and for the hosting costs.
3 to 4 million dollars annually is quite a chunk of money indeed. It certainly is not peanuts.
So where's the fraud?
In the fact that, according to those same reports, Wikipedia is donated about 200 million dollars every year, give or take.
The same financial reports reveal that the total amount of assets owned by Wikipedia is about 300 million dollars.
Which means that if running costs, ie. servers and internet providers were the only expense, they could run Wikipedia for almost a hundred years without getting a single penny more in donations.
Yet, they just keep begging and begging for more donations, getting about 200 million dollars every single year, and spending 3 to 4 million in running costs. Every single year, several times a year, they just keep running those e-begging campaigns even though the foundation is swimming in money and they absolutely and categorically are not in need of any more of it, not at least for literally 50-100 years.
One has to ask: Where is all that extra money going?
Wikipedia might not be the biggest fraud this century in terms of total money defrauded, but it might arguably be in terms of outright blatant misdirection: They are defrauding people and companies (some of whom are literally donating millions of dollars), pretending that they need those donations for their running costs, without these people and companies even knowing nor realizing that Wikipedia is already so immensely rich that they don't need that money for that purpose.
In fact, they are so incredibly successful in this misdirection that many people outright defend them even if they become fully aware of the situation. Many people are so utterly enthralled and indoctrinated into the mentality surrounding Wikipedia that they literally don't care that Wikipedia actually doesn't need that money. They literally don't care if the donation requests are essentially a form of fraud and done using misleading claims and lies.
This makes it quite different from recent famous frauds, like the Theranos incident: In that case, when people found out that the entire thing was a fraud, they demanded blood. The culprits were dragged to court and sentenced to jail, and the public at large was in full agreement that it was a serious crime and the culprits must be punished.
Wikipedia, however, has been significantly smarter than that. When it comes to Wikipedia, even when people are told how they are defrauding hundreds of millions of dollars of donation money that they don't actually need, most people are actually defending Wikipedia! They literally don't care and think that's ok!
It's actually quite incredible, when you think about it.
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