I've mentioned this in another post but it is worth repeating here. The steemcleaners aren't an official part of steemit, its a group of volunteers. The funds raised go to removing the payouts from plagiarized posts, helping to fund the operation of the cheetah bot, and rewarding the users/members of the group who spend hours looking for plagiarized posts.

I'd like to think that every steemian would voluntarily donate their time and precious voting power to fight abuse without any monetary incentive but alas that isn't the case. The amount of plagiarized posts on steemit is staggering and it takes a ton of voting power to remove all of those payouts. Go look at a steemcleaners log post and look how many posts that are downvoted. All of those removed payouts are steem that is going back in the pool to go to deserving members instead of plagiarists and scammers.