Why do people do this?

This is like the fifth time this has happened to me in the past year. Someone on lemmy had seen my posts here and there, and contacted me to say he wanted to help. A private, out of the blue message. He said that he'd be coming into some money and would send me £200 at the beginning of October. Considering how difficult I've been finding it to get mutual aid responses lately, having to make multiple reposts over weeks, this was a huge relief and I was counting on it. October came, and nothing, but I didn't want to nag him. Eventually a week passed and I decided to check if he still intended to do it, I'd rather know if he'd changed his mind than be left hanging. All his posts have been wiped and he seems to no longer be a member there. He took my email address for paypal so he could have still done it, or emailed me to let me know it wasn't coming, but didn't.

Why do people even promise gifts in advance? It's just a huge, crushing disappointment when they don't come through. I wish people would stop doing that. I had one person on lemmy string me along for weeks with daily promises of help which never materialised (he actually got banned as he'd been terrible to multiple people), quite a while ago I even had several people here on mutual aid do it.

I still get so much unsolicited advice too. I had someone on lemmy send me multiple long, rambling messages telling me to get into bitcoin to solve my problems and if I don't then my problems are my own choosing. How am I supposed to buy bitcoin with no money, and how would I explain it to the DWP? If I get my benefits reinstated, it will adversely affect me. When I explained this to him he said "Money is only real if you choose to accept it as real," and then suggested that taking illegal drugs would make me feel better. Um, wow, helpful thanks.

And whenever I ask for help paying for transport, without fail I get someone telling me that in their city they have free services to take the disabled to hospital and I just MUST have something like that here if I would only search for it. So then I have to exhaust myself and waste time writing out a message, for the hundredth time, re-explaining to yet another person that I have already checked every service and there is nothing that I'm both eligible for, and is free. Do these people think they are being helpful? I'm tired enough already without dealing with this.