A Hurricane Season Charity Note
The first message just popped into my Inbox: “Hurricane Relief”.
Here we go again.
If you want to contribute to hurricane relief, please do so via some established charity that you KNOW, with 100% certainty, will use your donation for its intended purpose. I’m not going to list any here, nor will I recommend any.
Why? Because even some established charities made appeals for donations after Hurricane Katrina three years ago, yet some donations that people thought were going to go to provide relief for hurricane victims were used for other purposes.
But whatever you do, PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO AN EMAIL REQUEST FOR CHARITY, DON’T MAKE DONATIONS BASED ON A WEB PAGE YOU SEE, AND DON’T ASSUME THAT SO-CALLED “HURRICANE SALES” WILL USE THE PROCEEDS FROM THE SALE TO HELP HURRICANE VICTIMS.
Serious. If you really want to give (which is a good thing to do), find a legitimate charity and give through them.
If there’s one thing we learned from Hurricane Katrina, it’s that some people will simply take advantage of a tragedy to make a few quick bucks. Don’t let it happen again.
And above all, NEVER CLICK ON A LINK in any “Hurricane Whatever” emails. They very well could lead you to a site that installs malicious code on your server.
Thanks,
Tom