This seems like a correct answer. The company (1) wants to be seen as the sort of company that helps charities, (2) doesn't care deeply about the charities, and (3) wants to motivate employees.

The first part explains why they have a budget for charities, and the second and third part together explain why they let employees allocate that budget instead of the company doing it itself. The charitable explanation of the second part is that the company trusts their employees to have good knowledge about charities, and thus kinda outsources the research of good charities to them.

On the other hand, an uncharitable explanation is that if most employees don't donate to charities, then this strategy allows the company to appear more generous than it actually is. For example, if a company with 1000 employees publicly declares to match each employee's donations up to $1000, it gives an impression as if they are going to donate $1000000 to charities, while in fact they may know that only five of their employees actually donate to charities, so the expected expense is $5000. (There is a risk this could backfire, but maybe they did experiments with smaller sums in the previous years, and/or maybe there is a small print somewhere making an exception in the case that too many employees decide to donate.)

I think it can be taken for granted that people on this site have an elevated sense of skepticism

They also have an elevated sense of contrarianism. I suspect it's not enough to make them literally send money to a scammer, but enough to argue publicly about giving the benefit of doubt.

My long comment was written for the audience. To make people potentially swayed by clever arguments remember the context -- that this is a website where we publicly talk about donating to MIRI, publicly talk about money in general, already have a lot of quality financial advice, and no one is preventing our mysterious benefactor from posting an article.

So, Vaniver, are you personally going to cooperate with this guy in the "donating to MIRI through you" project? Could you please promise in advance to write an article about it when the financial transaction is over?

I apologize if I wronged you, but if you are honest, please act publicly, especially when it includes asking members to participate in financial transactions.

Money is no taboo here. MIRI asks for money publicly by posting an article (December 2015, August 2015, ...). Members post articles with financial advice (Twenty basic rules for intelligent money management, Financial Effectiveness Repository, A Guide to Rational Investing, and many debates in the regular Open Threads). According to our recent survey, 71 members work in "Finance/Economics" and 38 work in "Law"; and although some of them specialize in things irrelevant to your proposal, most likely a few could provide a valuable feedback, maybe even a warning of what could possibly go wrong.

It is your insisting to work behind the courtains that seems fishy to me. You try to make the recipients of your messages feel special, yet you and your associate copy/paste the same messages to multiple people. If your goal is to provide free education, you could have posted the first lesson publicly. If you don't want to be public with your name or with the name of your company, just create a pseudonymous account called e.g. "JumpingSquirrel2016" and refer to your company as e.g. "CompanyX". Even if your goal is to find two or three people to cooperate with privately in the future, you can still advertise your skills by posting one free lesson publicly. People who are experts in some area don't have to keep all their knowledge secret; there is usually at least 90% of the information known to enough people, sometimes even taught at universities.

For now, it seems like your priority is to send money through someone else, because reasons ("accelerating the value created"). Everything else seems like a cover story to make people cooperate. I suspect that the promised free education is also supposed to only happen after the person participated in the transaction.

If you are fake, your likely next step would be to send someone a fake check or fake "payment confirmation", and then use social engineering and time pressure to make them send a part of the money back to you before they can verify that they actually received the money. Which is much easier to do in private, even with dozen people in parallel. Would be more difficult to achieve when communicating with all people publicly, especially if they were warned about this option in advance.

So my advice, if you are serious, is to post a message in an Open Thread (it could be strategical to wait two days until someone creates "Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016" in the "Discussion" section) describing why exactly do you need to send money through someone else, and describe the specific steps in this transaction. Specifically, promising to never ask people to send you back the money (either all or a part) and not to use time pressure until they have fully verified that they have actually received the money. For the sake of transparency, you should publish the names of specific users and the amount of money sent through them, and they should verify it using their own accounts.

Meanwhile, feel free to publish any free education in the current Open Thread or in the next one.

There is a chance that you are right. I feel like it's about 10% though. I apologize in advance if I am wrong. But I acted on the chance that I'm right and that I may save some naive altruistic student's money.

It is promoted now, so it will stay on the main page for a longer time. (I don't know how long the scammers will stay here.)

I reposted it in the facebook group.

I also am not sure they're scams in the traditional sense.

If there is nothing fishy, why do they contact people via private messages instead of posting in the forum?

Typically the reason for contacting people individually, when the public announcement would be the natural way, is to prevent the contacted people from seeing each other's reactions.

Thank you for the explanation! I posted a warning in a separate article. (Ironically, the second private message mentioned in the article was sent to my account.)