Natural disasters, such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes and earthquakes bring out the best in people who want to donate to charities to help the victims. Unfortunately natural disasters also bring out the worst in scammers who are quick to take advantage of the generosity of people by contacting them posing as charities, but instead of collecting funds to help the victims of these natural disasters, these scam artists steal the money for themselves under false pretenses. The devastating floods recently in central Texas have caused tremendous damage and loss of life. I wrote about charity scams related to the floods in the Scam of the day for July 10th, but it is worth writing about these scams again as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has indicated his office is investigating numerous charity scams related to the floods.

Among the people stepping up to help the victims of the floods in Texas is country music legend George Strait who is putting on a concert on July 27th to benefit the victims of the floods.  However, scammers have posted phony advertisements for the concert on Facebook with an email address extremely close to the real email address for obtaining tickets which tricked a couple into sending $10,000 for four tickets to the concert to the scammers.  For information about tickets to the real concert use this link. https://www.georgestrait.com/news/

Charities are not subject to the federal Do Not Call List so even if you are signed up for the federal Do Not Call List, legitimate charities are able to contact you by phone. The problem is that whenever you get a phone call, you can never be sure as to who is really calling you so you may be contacted either by a fake charity or a scammer posing as a legitimate charity. Using a technique called spoofing, the scammers can manipulate your Caller ID to make it appear that the call is coming from a legitimate charity when it is not. Similarly, when you are solicited for a charitable contribution by email, social media or text message you cannot be sure as to whether the person contacting you is legitimate or not.

Through the use of AI, scammers are contacting people through social media with pleas for charitable donations.  Often these social media posts will contain AI enhanced photos and videos and you can never be sure if the posts are legitimate.

TIPS

Never provide credit card information over the phone to anyone whom you have not called or in response to an email or text message. Before you give to any charity, you should check out the charity with http://www.charitynavigator.org where you can learn whether or not the charity itself is a scam. You can also see how much of the money that the legitimate charity collects actually goes toward its charitable purposes and how much it uses for fund raising and administrative costs.

Here is a link to charitynavigator’s picks for the best charities for donations to help the victims of the Texas floods. https://www.charitynavigator.org/discover-charities/where-to-give/central-texas-flooding/

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