What Are Charity, Donation, Foundation, Grants And Awards Scams?

[Roxy]

Charity, donation, foundation, grants and promotional awards scams operate under the guise that a person has been gifted, awarded, or won a sum of money by way of charity.

Other charity modalities used may be a scammer telling you that you are the recipient of a grant or a donation from a foundation. Sometimes a scammer will impersonate someone who is widely known to recently have won a national lottery and who now wants to give a portion of their winnings to you as a donation for one reason or another. Other types of donation and grant scams may use the guise that they are from a large multinational corporation or that they are a well known philanthropist.

Scammers also may simply portray themselves as wealthy individuals wanting your help to give money to a charity organization on their behalf.

In other (more rare) cases these scams will pretend to be acting on behalf of an orphanage, church or a charity organization that is asking you to donate money to them.

There are also scams that request donations focused around current events during times of a natural disasters somewhere in the world. For example, for flood victims, hurricane victims, earthquake victims, pandemics, etc.

In some cases a scammer may also pretend to be a charity organization wanting your help in some way to simply move a large amount of funds for one reason or another.

During the course of the scam the scammer may provide a so-called online banking website (with login details) in an attempt to prove that the funds truly exist and are safely sitting in a bank account awaiting payout. In all cases these bank websites are always fraudulent/fake websites owned and controlled by the scammer and the money that they are showing within the bank account are fictitious funds in a non-existent bank account. The scammer may also ask you to contact 2-3 different people that the scammer claims are also involved with the transaction as a psychological technique designed to make the transaction seem more legitimate. In most cases though you are dealing with only one scammer who is acting behind all of the various different personas being presented.

These scams are a form of what is known as Advance-Fee Fraud. Advance-Fee Fraud is best described as an offer of money, merchandise, services, employment, or even romance, but where the victim is asked to pay a fee in advance to obtain whatever is being promised to them by the scammer. The main scam strategy of all advance-fee fraud scams is to try to persuade the victim to send money and continue to send more and more money to the scammer as many times as possible thereafter and until the victim eventually runs out of money and/or goes into debt as a result of losses from the scam.

Please click here to read more about the psychological techniques used to deceive people with Advance-Fee Fraud scams. The following article on Wikipedia also explains more about Advance-Fee Scams in general: Wikipedia Link