Charities Try To Cheat Their Way to Chase Millions

Sept. 14, 2012 - PRLog -- Media Contact:
Dan Koifman
212-920-7805
dan@dankoifman.com


CHARITIES TRY TO CHEAT THEIR WAY TO CHASE MILLIONS

New York, NY (9/14/12)  On Sept 19th 2012, Chase Community Giving will end voting for a program that lets charities compete using Facebook votes for $5,000,000 in cash grants.

The problem? Five million dollars is a lot of money for needy charities and some are resorting to vote rigging, stealing millions from the neediest people.

DogsInDanger.com is a national 501(3) charity that helps save the lives of dogs scheduled to die in shelters.  After monitoring voting patterns of many of their competitors, DogsInDanger.com executives found clear examples of vote tampering. Large percentage of votes were coming from seemingly fake accounts with no activity or content outside of voting to receive the cash prizes. According to Facebook’s own estimates, over 83 million Facebook accounts are fake (1).

In order to authenticate their findings, DogsInDanger.com conducted an undercover investigation and spoke with several technology firms that claimed to have enabled other organizations to successfully rig online competitions. These companies offered to sell DogsInDanger thousands of votes in the Chase Giving contest for just pennies per vote. Using this fake Facebook network, it is possible to win the top $250,000 prize with just about a thousand dollars invested in buying votes.

The vote tampering issue was promptly reported to Chase Giving management. As of this writing, no response has been received from Chase.

“It is despicable that other organizations would resort to vote rigging and stealing funds from honest, deserving charities that play by the rules. When charities steal from each other, how much lower can our society go?” said Alex Aliksanyan, Founder and President of DogsInDanger.com.

DogsInDanger and other reputable charities for causes like children’s cancer, the homeless, etc. are being overwhelmed by the cheaters, unable to compete.  Charities are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars which are critical to their activities. Unscrupulous cheaters are stealing these much-needed funds under Chase and Facebook’s noses.

DogsInDanger.com is a free service for shelters and adopters, allowing people to search for dogs in urgent need. In the economic climate of the past two years, funding for DogsInDanger.com has decreased substantially. Winning funds in competitions like Chase Community Giving is instrumental to their continued operations.

(1) http://articles.cnn.com/2012-08-02/tech/tech_social-media...