Case. Charity on bones

For privacy and security reasons, some data has been changed without distorting the main important details.

Many people in the channel know that I sometimes volunteer to help with various social projects and recently just such a thing happened.

An organization appears in the city N, supposedly helping sick children. There are a lot of such organizations nowadays, have you ever thought about how many fraudulent foundations there are for one real one?

Surely you have seen complaint posts in large media channels about freezing puppies and kittens. One day some users decided to check the details and transparency of reporting of one such site and...it turned out to be very sad. I myself help one shelter and my choice was conditioned just by the transparency of reporting on incoming/outgoing funds, the condition of animals, evaluation of the owner as a person, etc., it is not a quick process.

At the same time, some people are not afraid to use sick children, including deceased ones, as an excuse.

One organization that exposes this sort of thing is Charity on Bones (https://vk.com/blagotoks). I haven't read them in a long time, so I can't speak about their objectivity now, but it used to be a very good and high quality publick.

Act One

It started with one woman contacting me. She had been observing one such fund for some time, which supposedly helped people with serious illnesses to collect money and revealed a lot of strange things, but she could not structure it all and bring it to the end, so she turned to me. Here you can say that this is how other scammers can eliminate competitors. I agree, but I managed to check and the woman was not seen in such things.

Act two

My first act was standard: information gathering. Social networks, website, requisites, contacts, data on the owner and involved persons, the presence of legal data on the organization (there was none), analysis of reports, checking ads with requests for help (whether the person\relatives from the ad really approached them or they just grabbed the photo and story).

After the initial data collection, analytics began: checking the reputation of the owner and those involved, the history of creation and changes to the site, analyzing ads, social networks.

It turned out that the founder's page in vk is registered to a random name, but their photos were put. It was possible to get the number and mail, from this the real full name has already flowed out. As is often the case, the man had a huge number of debts: on loans, utilities, but when the real page was found in Vk, there mottled allegedly expensive purchases (but it was clear that most - fake). And it was not the first fake page, there were many of them, many were already blocked. All had a peculiarity: all photos and posts on the wall were uploaded on the same day, and the site of the “foundation” was long abandoned.

Taking into account the assessment of the owner's reputation, we began to lean towards the version that all his activities are a fraud. But we need to remain objective and avoid bias in our work.

We decided to interact with the founder - to ask for checks, screens of incoming and outgoing funds, medical statements, communication with relatives of those they “helped”. At first the answers to our questions were delayed, referring to active help to their “wards”, and then put frankly rude to communicate. In short:

- If you do not want to help, do not waste my time.
- I will not provide you with anything, who are you?

Can one think that the person is really very busy and does not care about reporting? You can, which is why we continued.

Another obvious way to understand whether they are scammers or not is to identify their “underlings”, which is what we started to do. Despite the fact that the photos were taken of real people, their history, medical diagnoses, contacts, and full names had been changed. We were still able to quickly find real people from the ads based on the photos. Unfortunately, some of them had already died, which was confirmed by their relatives.

Later it turned out that the founder of the “fund” is doing this not for the first time (he does not even learn from his mistakes, at least he would have made everything more convincing!). And there had already been complaints against the founder.

Act Three

Further actions were also standard: I drew up an analytical statement, which the volunteer distributed among his inner circle of similar volunteers. As far as I know, a statement was written and the volunteer team is now dealing with this situation with the law enforcement authorities.