Thailand's First Farang eBegger? — Drummond's 145 Donation Appeals and the Scrubbed Evidence That Followed

Why this matters

• The begging-then-scrubbing pattern is itself the evidence. The text that asks for money is still on the live pages. The PayPal form that received the money is not. Removing the form prevents future donations; leaving the text makes past donations harder to deny. The current state is the worst-of-both for transparency.
• The contradiction is in his own archive. In the same months he was running 145 donation appeals he was criticising other people for “cough up”, “more money”, and boiler-room financial pressure. Same archive. Same period. Opposite framing for himself versus everyone else.
• Major-donor accountability is absent. The 4 November 2014 post explicitly acknowledged a six-figure contribution from oil worker Ally Cooper to “the fighting fund against foreign ‘businessmen’”. No subsequent public breakdown of how that money was spent has been published.
• No post-litigation reconciliation. When the major 2011–2016 Thai cases against him collapsed (most after the principal plaintiffs were themselves convicted of fraud or extortion — see /evidence/drummond-promoted-failed-fund), no published statement of what was left in the fighting fund or what happened to it has been located.

The PayPal form is gone. The appeal text isn't.

The Wayback Machine 14 April 2015 captures of articles 30, 46, and 48 contain a functional PayPal form. The current andrew-drummond.com and andrew-drummond.news versions of the same posts do not. Some appeal text survives on the current pages; the form, the hosted button id, and the support image have been removed.

Archived PayPal form snippet from the 20 July 2014 post, captured by Wayback on 14 April 2015 (exact HTML preserved by the Internet Archive):

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick" />
<input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="ZX233SXWT2EL8" />
<input type="image" src=".../support-andrew-paypal.png"
  name="submit" alt="PayPal — The safer, easier way to pay online." />
</form>

This is not “every appeal was deleted”. Some appeal text survives on the current pages. What is missing is the actual mechanism for receiving the money — the form, the hosted button id, the support image. The words that asked for money survive. The plumbing that received it is gone.

The FeedBurner endpoint feeds.feedburner.com/andrewdrummond now returns HTTP 404, and the original Blogger-style URLs for the donation posts return page-not-found responses; only the WordPress-style slugs remain accessible — and those have had the payment infrastructure surgically removed.

Six accountability questions Drummond has never publicly answered

1. Total raised across the 145 appeals (July 2014 – February 2015 peak)? No public figure has been published. The Ally Cooper six-figure contribution was acknowledged on 4 November 2014. Subsequent contributions implied but never aggregated.
2. Allocation of the six-figure Ally Cooper contribution? “The fighting fund against foreign ‘businessmen’ in Thailand” was the stated purpose. No published spending breakdown.
3. Fighting-fund-vs-personal-income separation? None published. The quoted appeals interleave “fighting these cases”, “bring up three great kids”, and “try and earn a living as a journalist” as joint justifications for the same donations.
4. Post-litigation reconciliation? When the major 2011–2016 Thai cases collapsed — most after the principal plaintiffs (Drew Noyes, Brian Goudie) were themselves convicted of extortion and fraud — no published statement of what was left in the fighting fund or what happened to it.
5. Why was the PayPal form removed but the appeal text not? Removing the form makes future donations impossible. Removing the text would make the past donations easier to deny. The current state — text without mechanism — is the worst of both for transparency.
6. Has any contribution ever been returned to a donor whose underlying case was won and the legal costs recovered? Not documented anywhere located.

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the routine accountability questions any working journalist would ask of any other journalist running a public donation operation across years. They have not been answered.