Fake charities: how to check a charity before you give

Nov 3, 2026 · 4 minute read · By IsSiteLegit

Before you give, find the charity's real website yourself and check it in an official register. Never donate through a link, call or message that pushed you to act right now. Real charities are happy to wait while you check.

Why fake charities appear when people want to help

Scammers follow the news. After a hurricane, an earthquake or a war, and again in the holiday season, many people feel generous. Fake charities use that feeling.

They often copy the look and name of well-known causes. They may send a text, an email, a social media post or a crowdfunding page. The story is moving, and the request is urgent.

Common warning signs

A name that is almost right

Look-alike names are the oldest trick. A fake might add a word like "relief", "united" or "fund" to a name you know. Its web address might be something like hope-relief-fund.example, which is a made-up example, not a real site.

Check the exact spelling of the name and the address. One swapped letter or an extra word is a red flag.

Pressure to give now

Phrases like "only today", "your gift will be matched if you act in 24 hours" or "people are suffering while you wait" are meant to stop you thinking. A real appeal will still be there tomorrow.

Unusual ways to pay

Be very careful if you are asked to pay by:

• Gift cards. No genuine charity asks for these.
• Cryptocurrency. Payments are hard to trace and almost impossible to reverse.
• Wire transfer or cash app to a person. Real charities take donations through proper payment pages.

A charity may accept some of these in rare cases, but only on its own verified website. Never because someone on the phone asked.

Vague details

A fake often can't tell you what it does, where the money goes, or its registration number. It may also thank you in a generic way and offer no receipt.

Cold calls and unexpected messages

If someone calls or texts you out of the blue, you don't have to answer questions or give card details. Hang up and look the charity up yourself.

How to verify a charity in 5 steps

1. Get the exact name. Ask for the full legal name and registration number. If they dodge, stop.
2. Search an official register. In the US, the IRS has a tool for checking tax-exempt status at www.irs.gov. Independent watchdogs such as give.org publish reports on charities. In the UK, the official register of charities is on www.gov.uk. In other countries, look for your national charity regulator.
3. Find the real website yourself. Type the address you found in the register, or search for the name. Don't use the link in the message.
4. Check the site. Paste the address into the free IsSiteLegit checker. It looks at things like domain age, security blacklists and look-alike names, and shows its evidence. You can also read our guide on how to check if a website is legit.
5. Look at the link before you click. Our guide on checking a link before clicking shows how.

Giving safely

• Donate on the charity's own website, which you reached yourself.
• Pay by credit card if you can. It gives you more options to dispute a charge than gift cards or crypto.
• Keep the receipt and the confirmation email.
• Be careful with crowdfunding pages. They are often set up by individuals, so ask whether you know the person and whether the cause can be confirmed elsewhere.
• Give to established charities that already work in a disaster area, rather than to a new group that appeared overnight.

What the public feeds show

Fake pages often hide on free hosting services, which are cheap and quick to set up. In the phishing links listed by public security feeds on 2026-11-03, there were 300 links, and 65% of them sat on free hosting platforms such as pages.dev. That is not about charities specifically, but it shows why a polished page proves nothing. A donation page can look professional and still be fake.

What a check can and can't tell you

Automated checks, including ours, are useful but not perfect. In the last 7 days, IsSiteLegit ran 124 checks. Most came back as likely legit, 10 as caution and 3 as high risk. A brand-new scam site may not have been flagged anywhere yet, so a clean result is not a guarantee of safety.

Use a check as one step alongside the official register, the exact spelling of the name, and your own judgment about the pressure you feel.

If you already paid or clicked

1. Contact your bank or card company straight away. Ask to dispute the payment and block the card if you shared its details.
2. If you paid with a gift card, contact the card company right away and tell them it was a scam.
3. If you paid with crypto, tell the exchange or wallet provider, though recovery is often unlikely.
4. If you entered a password, change it on the real site and anywhere else you reused it.
5. Report it. In the US, use reportfraud.ftc.gov. In the UK, use www.actionfraud.police.uk. In Australia, use www.scamwatch.gov.au. Reports help others.
6. Watch your accounts for the next few weeks for strange charges.

Don't feel embarrassed. These scams are designed to work on kind people. If you want to check a charity's website before you give, try IsSiteLegit.

Written with AI from IsSiteLegit's data and published after an automatic fact check: every number in this post comes from that data. Figures from security feeds describe the links listed on the day of the post. Where we link to a website’s IsSiteLegit result, a "likely legit" rating describes what our automated checks found when they ran. It is not an endorsement of the company, its products or its offers. How we write.