On Sunday evening, the day after a bomb exploded on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, Lee Parker visited his friend Ivan White at his apartment in Elizabeth, N.J., to borrow some clothes for a job interview the next morning and to watch some football. Mr. Parker had been struggling to find work for the past few years; he was laid off after Hurricane Sandy and had been sleeping on a series of sofas belonging to friends for some time. The interview the following day was for work at a trucking company. Mr. Parker had mentioned to Mr. White that in addition to a new outfit, he wished he had a new backpack.

At some point the two friends left the apartment to get some beer, an excursion that took them past the Elizabeth train station where, as if a genie had suddenly blinked twice, a backpack appeared on top of a waste bin. “I once found a new Macy’s coat with the tags still on it on top of a trash can,” Mr. White explained outside the train station on Wednesday. “So, you never know what you’re going to find.”

With that in mind, the two men opened the backpack and found what appeared to be explosive devices. Undeterred, they carried the backpack to an unpopulated area, so that if it did explode, no one would be harmed. Then they walked to the local police station, about five minutes away, to report what they had discovered.

The backpack held five bombs. The next day, Ahmad Khan Rahami was arrested in connection with those and the other explosives placed near the start of a charity running race in Seaside Park, N.J., and in a Dumpster and in a trash can in Chelsea.

Almost as soon as Mr. Rahami was taken into custody, on Monday, an online campaign was started on the site GoFundMe.com, intended to raise $10,000 as a show of gratitude for Mr. Parker and Mr. White, who by virtue of sartorial need and serendipity had averted a potentially lethal terrorist attack. The money was to be split three ways, among the two men and an organization called the Elizabeth Coalition to House the Homeless.

The campaign was started by a group of men involved in another Elizabeth-based charity, created in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, called At Heart’s Length, who had heard about the men’s involvement from a friend. Giuliano Farina, one of the founders of At Heart’s Length, said that Mr. Parker and Mr. White were not asked about the campaign before it went forward, but that he and the others at his organization wanted the men to be recognized for what they had done.

Within a few days, the campaign raised more than $21,000.

A backlash developed just as quickly. It is perhaps a mark of how much antipathy is directed at crowdfunding — a great vessel of cultural entitlement that has people depending on the largess of the internet for what, in the old days, they would pay for themselves (in vitro fertilization, gender-reassignment surgery, creative vanity projects, trips to New Zealand) — that the effort was met with accusations of dark, or at least obscure, motives. Was At Heart’s Length, a charity of eclectic purpose delivering youth sports, holiday meals and citizenship counseling, using Mr. Parker and Mr. White to advance its own agenda? The GoFundMe page listed the charity’s address and invited donors to send money there as well if they chose.

Mr. Farina said his own organization would keep none of the money. He attributed some of the mistrust to personal ill will among local residents toward one of the men who had started the campaign, who some felt was riding the current narrative of Mr. Parker and Mr. White for his own political purposes. And that, Mr. Farina felt certain, was a complete misreading of the events.

Another strain of grievance among commenters on the GoFundMe page was that the Elizabeth Coalition to House the Homeless, an organization more than 30 years old that operates in a county with a poverty rate of 27 percent and in a town, Mr. White said, where some people were living in tented encampments, somehow didn’t deserve any of the money. Mr. Parker, who became homeless after living in a Y.M.C.A. in Newark, clearly wasn’t receiving the group’s services. Why should it benefit from all of the publicity now surrounding him? Hearing about Mr. Parker, a local professor had begun paying for his stay in a hotel, but the coalition, Mr. Parker said, was now working on finding him more permanent housing.

Both men have had difficulties, and the feeling among some was that they should receive all of the money. Mr. White hasn’t worked in a few years. He has diabetes, and part of his foot was amputated, he told me. A job making jet-engine parts ended when the factory closed, and his health got in the way of other jobs he held, working in sales, he said. He sent two daughters to college; one, a security guard, now has three daughters of her own.

What do we owe those who do good? In another time, the answer might have been simply honor and respect. But at a moment when fashioning the right Instagram profile can catapult you into a higher tax bracket and crash-landing an airplane when you are, in fact, an airline pilot can lead to speaking engagements, global fame and a movie about you starring Tom Hanks, the expectations become very different. “Make no mistake, this isn’t a cottage industry,” Mr. White told me. “But if there’s a reward out there, I’ll take it.”