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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

> In Oregon, the attorney general added that Kars4Kids failed to disclose that its offer of a "free vacation" for vehicle donors was designed to recruit people to attend timeshare presentations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kars4Kids

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Reading that whole page leaves me wondering if this, and possibly how many other charities are really just mechanisms for business/wealth/power development.

Just assume 100% of them are unless they can prove otherwise.

Definitely. Another example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Devilcorp/comments/1amkza4/parker_p...

(Charity Navigator, GuideStar, and ProPublica’s non profit database are all useful to drilling down your suss out legitimacy)

No one gets accidentally wealthy, especially if they are in the business of "giving money away"

Sorting an excel spreadsheet to find what the "largest" charities in canada are exposed $3.2 billion in fraudulent tax receipts claimed by 100,000 Canadian tax filers https://eaves.ca/2010/04/14/case-study-open-data-and-the-pub...

You should mostly assume that they are, in general, vehicles for the empowered to direct toward goals of their choosing (e.g. reputation/legitimacy-building), and that those goals occasionally have externalities for anyone else as an accident at best.

Wait until you hear about the religious charity lottery exemption.

It would probably be a good idea to eliminate tax exemptions for nonprofits.

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