I have received dozens of calls over the past year or so from specifically these charities, as I recognize their names. They are in the class of “if you question anything, they get abusive and/or hang up on you.” Ask for an IRS Form 990, which any legitimate charity would be glad to provide, and they terminate the conversation.
Reading between the lines of that news article, it looks like the perpetrators won’t be prosecuted, won’t give back any money, and will be free to do it again, even though one dude is barred from this kind of activity. I don’t think it will stop him; he’ll just move offshore and change his name. And since they “settled,” the details won’t be made public.
They raised $187 million from suckers, and sent less than 3% of that to charitable causes, unless you call dating website subscriptions a charitable cause. I wonder how many yachts J.R. has.
I’ve gotten donation solicitations from some “veteran’s group” and a “highway patrol” group. They called and asked if they could send me stuff in the mail and I said yes, then when I got the materials and did some research I could tell they were clearly fake.
These groups suck because they make people leery of donating to real organizations. They make it hard for anyone to trust charities!
I did get surprisingly good stickers from the veterans and state trooper charities, though. I expected the state trooper sticker to fade within a month and it’s been bright yellow for 2 years now!
For years, I’ve wanted a 50% rule: if 50% or more of the funds a ‘charity’ raises goes to fundraising, managerial salaries, and overhead, then they lose their tax-exempt status.
Why anybody agrees to donate over the phone is a mystery to me. I won’t even donate to organizations that I know and trust via phone, because people can claim to be anything.