Opinion/Editorial
NEVER EVER EVER EVER
They come to you with damaged, mistreated, and abandoned pets. They come to you with little children recovering from terrible diseases. They come to you with great and brilliant programming and music. They come to you with forlorn but wonderfully compassionate appeals for help in getting elected or appointed or whatever. Of course, they need and want money, and you know that as the appeals scroll across your screen, on television or the Internet, but it’s much more damagingly and fraudulently (legal fraud, of course) delivered to you being help to the downtrodden, the hurt pets, the poor candidate or even a public television service. Even many admired and beloved non-profit organizations like the Red Cross, United Way, and Doctors Without Borders are deeply involved in scamming the American and European public. How are they doing this is the substance and conclusion of this article…and why you need to consider what you do with your contributions and bank account in the future.
Things you must know before you donate anything on a monthly continuing basis. First of all, once you give your bank instructions to begin the contributions every month, you may not stop the contributions from coming out of your account. Only the entity that is withdrawing the money can make the contributions stop unless you go nuclear with your account and close it. Closing a long-held bank account can be painful for most people, however, and so many who have contributions coming out, since most are not that large, just leave the account alone.
There are four very large financial companies in the USA and abroad that buy these continuing withdrawal accounts. The general agreed-upon price is around seventeen times the amount coming out of an account monthly. If the withdrawal is set at twenty dollars a month, then one of these companies will pay $480 to acquire the client. That figure of 17 is set because that is ten less than most withdrawal account deductions are made in an average deduction situation. The company, over two years, or so, makes $140 per account, or around sixteen percent of money invested. It can be much more and, of course, if an account is closed, much less. The average ‘take’ on owning these accounts and getting the money is, however, around eight hundred dollars, which means that the purchasing new ‘owner’ of the account deduction makes. A three hundred and some odd dollars profit on an investment of 480 spread over three years becomes about forty-some odd percent.
The quite legal fraud in all this is about the identity and sales process of those participating. The causes, charities, non-profits, and more need the cash immediately, in general. They would rather accept a severely discounted amount today than gamble that the payments would continue over time, not to mention the time it takes to collect the deductions. The moral fraud is more significant, as this kind of behavior becomes known and the supposed ‘super-integrity’ operations that depend upon the public believing their integrity and will one day soon begin to affect the frequency and amount of money people are willing to fork over.
Personally, the author of this article would rather believe in the cause contributed to, and the beneficent, generous, and compassionate use of my money, not to mention stopping automatic checking account withdrawals if asked, than I would ever buy into having such ‘unstoppable’ deductions handled or potentially stopped on command by some offshore, or even onshore, financial company of unknown repute. Political concerns have also gotten involved with this ‘transfer’ of assets mess. They need cash right away, not many months down the road or over time. If credibility is not with you on this issue, and you have a monthly automatic withdrawal going, then call the concern that you think you are sending the money to every month and ask them to stop withdrawing. If that concern even responds to the call that will be good news, but it’s not likely, nor is that concern likely to report the name of the company getting the monthly payments, if the employees in customer service even know.
The advice, after investigating and then writing this article, is to continue a spirit of supporting good causes, but do not give bank withdrawal permission, whatsoever, to those (not friends or close supporters) whom you have no idea exist on this planet. The charitable concerns and even others, mean well but the result is that you end up being hurt.
Send a check instead.
