How to help LA fire victims without getting scammed

If you want to help victims of the Los Angeles fires, there are tools that will ensure your money goes to the right place - Image (c) ConsumerAffairs

Here are some tools to identify safe ways to give

Money is pouring into relief efforts for victims of the Los Angeles fires and you can be certain that scammers are trying to cash in, setting up dummy organizations with names that often mimic legitimate charities.

To make sure your donation actually helps someone and doesn’t line the pockets of a scammer, don’t respond to an unsolicited email asking for money. Instead, proactively contact an organization you know to be real.

Charity Watch monitors and grades charitable organizations, based on their administrative costs and overhead. The lower the amount spent on running the organization, the higher the grade.

Charity Navigator is another platform that helps donors ensure a charity group is legitimate. By entering the name of the group in the database, you not only learn if the group is real, Charity Navigator also rates it.

GoFundMe has set up a special page with different fundraising campaigns for fire relief, many of them narrowly targeted. In many cases, most of the donated money goes for the intended purpose.

Because anyone can set up a fundraising campaign, GoFundMe has assured donors that it makes sure anyone asking for donations for a cause is on the up and up.

GoFundMe says it uses a number of ways to verify that a campaign is legitimate and not a scam. The company uses a Trust & Safety team that constantly monitors fundraising efforts. It holds funds at a payment processor and only releases them once the campaign has been verified.