It’s being reported today that fraudsters have jumped on the opportunity to take advantage of the world’s sympathy for the horrific events in Japan, with record speed.
Social media and other online communications channels are being exploited, with the disaster is being used as a “hook” to draw in the unwary for a range of criminal activities. These range from malicious links on Facebook to email hoaxes and fake donations sites. (Yeah, we agree. It’s amazing how situations like this bring out heroes and total scum in roughly equal numbers…)
Please be warned, but don’t let this put you off of helping! Below are some links to legitimate UK based aid sites.
If you use your business’s Twitter account or Facebook page to promote these (or even just Tweet this post), you’ll be helping to crowd out the scammers as well as guide people to safe sites where they can donate:
The Disasters Emergency Committee facebook page is a great starting place if you want information about which agencies / charities are active in Japan.
Their website also includes direct links to these appeals: Red Cross, Save the Children, World Vision and Oxfam appeals; you can also follow the DEC on Twitter for coordinated updates.
Whenever a disaster comes along, people mention scams. Perhaps I’m lucky but have yet to see one (though hundreds on other subjects !). My 22 years in aid work have shown me that the small and middle level organizations are usually the ones that do the best, most dedicated and cost effective work. Pages like yours channel funds away from these true gems of organizations into the mega-groups, paying large salaries to their workers and with large overhead costs. In this way you do a major disservice to those in need pulling funds away from so many dedicated people and organizations who are operating at a considerably more grassroots level.
Hi William. Thanks for your thoughts – I’d actually recieved a scam email personally, which was the trigger for this post.
The purpose of the article was to encourage people to spread the word about those large scale appeals, hopefully meaning that additional givers would be recruited, but we take your point about smaller and potentially more agile organisations. If you have personal experience of any who are working in Japan, please feel free to put some links here and we’ll certainly check & publish them.
~ Kate