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Accidentally Donating to the Wrong Charity

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday March 25 2014, @05:48PM   
from the so-simple-an-idiot-could-do-it dept.

lhsi writes:

"It has been discovered that some people have been accidentally donating money to a different charity than they intended by using the wrong SMS keyword. In the last few days, a lot of donations have been made to the Cancer Research UK charity, however some have accidentally been made to Unicef instead where mobile users sent a text with the message "DONATE" instead of "BEAT" to a specific shortcode.

Unicef has said, "We contacted Cancer Research [UK] as soon as we became aware of what was happening. Unicef and Cancer Research [UK] have agreed that these donations will be received in full by Cancer Research [UK]."

Even knowing which word to use didn't help some people as their smartphone auto-corrected "BEAT" to "BEAR", and they were subsequently sent information about adopting a polar bear from the WWF."

• Re:Um... OK... (Score: 5, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday March 25 2014, @06:09PM

  by GungnirSniper (1671) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @06:09PM (#21096) Journal

  If it can happen accidentally, scammers will find a way to take advantage. From Yahoo: [yahoo.com]

  In less than two months after Hurricane Katrina, federal and state officials discovered scams such as a self-proclaimed white supremacist had set up fake online "charities" such as "neworleanscharities.com" allegedly to aid Katrina victims.

  It's not quite the same, but similar to registering a scam SMS code to steal from a real charity.

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