Should ATS start a new thread to show fake donation sites or corrupt organizations asking for donati

Should ATS start a new thread to show fake donation sites or corrupt organizations asking for donations? ATS did a pretty good job of bring attention to the corrupt and illegal ones in Haiti. During Haiti's aftermath you even had people starting save the animals donate to us when Haiti has no animals in there country. Now where did that money go?

Excellent idea.. Far too many unscrupulous individuals and groups out there who profit from misery and bloodshed..
Such a list would help ats members to avoid them and be able to know which ones actually do what they claim and help those in need. Maybe sticky it or a special forum with all thats happening these days...
Personally I dont and wont donate to any charity or group as most are corrupt with little to none of the funds raised going to what or who its supposed to. Instead I help directly when and where am able to.

reply to post by JBA2848

That sounds like a pretty good idea, in my opinion. Always good to know those to watch out for

I see Visa has picked there charities for Japan.

www.prnewswire.com...

That is a great idea, hoping that it is not limited to fake or fraudulent companies selling products or services that are completely worthless. As long as there is decent amount of research that goes into the process. If it were too easy you would just have a list of fortune 500 on there.

ATSer Beware

While it's well-meaning and reasonable to want to identify scams and fraudulent sites, we need to be very careful about what we do here.

From the AboveTopSecret.com Terms And Conditions Of Use:

15e.) Recruitment/Solicitation:

i) You will not use your membership in the Websites for any type of recruitment to any causes whatsoever. You will not Post, use the chat feature, use videos, or use the private message system to disseminate advertisements, chain letters, petitions, pyramid schemes, or any kind of solicitation for political action, social action, letter campaigns, or related online and/or offline coordinated actions of any kind.

ii) You will not Post, use the chat feature, use videos, or use the private message system to collect or ask for the personal information (data mining) about forum members, including email addresses and "real life" names, in any manner whatsoever, or for any reason whatsoever.

iii) You will not Post, use the chat feature, use videos, or use the private message system to solicit members of the Websites on behalf of another message board, online community or competitor. You will not attempt to use your membership to encourage or lure other members in any way to other websites or discussion boards in competition with TAN. Doing so will result in removal of your Post(s) and immediate termination of your account.

Inevitably when a disaster occurs, we'll see a rash of donation/solicitation posts pop up, which we are expected to promptly remove, and ban members who persist in posting them.

Whether they are "legitimate" or not is irrelevant. The problem is that anything along these lines can be used to acquire identity information from ATS members, and that is something we work hard to prevent.

A simple link to a website can be used to capture IP addresses, which can then be used to identify rough geographical location and attack member computers with port scans and other schemes. "Send me an email" can be used to collect an email address that can then be used for phishing scams and sold to spammers for profit. Sites that gain additional information, such as PayPal or credit card data through a seemingly innocuous transaction can cause much worse trouble than that, and devastate a member financially through identity theft and fraud.

The best way to guard against such problems is to prohibit solicitation of any kind, and that's the policy under which ATS operates.

As for identifying scam sites, there are too many problems associated with that. First off, posting links to them exposes members to exactly the sort of thing we're trying to prevent (i.e., IP address capture and the like). Secondly, identifying "scam sites" may lead to liability issues such as trade defamation if a site believes it has been falsely accused.

Finally, identifying any site, pro or con, can be used in nefarious ways as a loophole around the ATS prohibition against solicitation (i.e., a scammer posts a link to his site and says "check out this malicious site!"). Scammers can and will use every trick in the book to get identity data, especially what appear to be the worthiest of causes, playing on human emotional weakness. Even innocent, well-meaning people can be used as recruiters for scammers and never know it.

In other words, there's just too many ways things like this can go wrong, so the best thing to do is avoid the issue altogether. Ultimately, that's really not what ATS is for in the first place.

There are many places on the Internet where people can sign up for charities, worthy causes and online scams, but ATS isn't one of them. It doesn't matter whether they are "legitimate" or not, they don't belong here.

Anyway, a bit wordy (maybe I'll refine this a bit and post it as a PSA thread), but I hope this explains why we are so adamant about keeping both "charity" and "scam" links off ATS.

reply to post by Majic


No worries and good to hear.. Had noticed before that didnt see any here just hadnt realised why.. Its good that ats does it that way..

Yeah, I know it can seem cold-hearted to some folks, and I totally understand that, but our members always come first.

I expect the Japanese goverment with the third largest economy in the world has billions set aside for just this kind of thing. considering this is likely to have happend one day,. i hope they do... people are gonna be pissed if they find out all the spare cash was spend on furnishing the PM's office