Today Kevin Pietersen, one of England’s favourite cricketers, has managed to defeat the hoaxer of his online auction by drumming up support from his friends in a 24-hour money raising Twitter campaign initiated by Piers Morgan.
Shocked to the core after receiving a tweet from Stuart Broad mentioning a hoax bid for Kevin Pietersen’s Ashes kit and more, we at Bettor.com, along with several celebrities, responded to Piers Morgan’s campaign and added to the pot for it to equal the £32000 the hoaxer should have donated.
Like everyone else we were aware of the auction but didn’t realise there had been a hoax bidder until later. I was shocked, especially after seeing all the effort made by Kevin to raise awareness and help those affected by the Australian floods, so the least we could do was contribute.
Pietersen set up the online auction to raise funds that would go towards helping Australia’s flood victims. Up for grabs was Kevin’s Ashes kit plus airfares, accommodation and tickets to Sunday's 50-over match against http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Australia-c746 in Perth. It was knocked down at £32000 (AUS$51,000) but Pietersen was soon to realise that the bid was a fake. It was then that he displayed his disappointment on Twitter. After a few retweets by Broad and other cricketers, word soon got around (to New York!) and Piers Morgan announced that he would personally drive a 24-hour campaign to raise the amount not coughed up by the hoaxer at the auction.
As soon as I heard about the campaign I tweeted Piers. It took him a while to respond so I'm guessing his PR team were checking out Bettor.com to see if Jayne Clarke really existed and wasn't another hoaxer!
Many of the other contributions came from many of Piers’ celebrity pals including Lord Alan Sugar, Phillip Schofield, Kirstie Allsopp, Andrew Flintoff, Chris Moyles, Michael Vaughan, Calum Best, Frank Lampard, Chris Evans, Peter Jones.
To see sports players endeavour to help others then get treated like that, it puts a bad taste in your mouth but it’s been good to see that Kevin’s received all this support after what happened.
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