GitHub is vetting applicants. If they do get hoodwinked, they are at least getting hoodwinked into giving money to somebody they thought was doing worthwhile work to begin with.
So your hypothesis is that they'd rather assume this potential cost for the sake of publicity ?
Also, in the "paid to sponsor" scenario they'd be hoodwinke into giving money both to someone worthwhile and someone totally unknown to them. I'd be really curious to know the technical or legal possibles responses.
That's a good point actually, I suppose it doesn't indeed really matters to them where it goes as long as they can say "we gave X to open source projects", X probably being already defined.
