THE JACK & JILL FOUNDATION says it has refunded €130,000 in donations to credit card holders whose cards were used by scammers to make small donations.
The charity said this evening that it had received over 1,000 small donations – most of them under €5 – from credit cards associated with financial institutions around the world.
The donations were made by scammers trying to test if the details they had accessed were still working. Whenever the donation was successful, the scammer knew that the credit card details were still ‘live’ and could be used to make other purchases online.
The charity said it had gone public so that other charities and members of the public could be aware of the scam, which chief executive Jonathan Irwin described as “a sad reality of credit card skimming”.
While the charity itself has not been left out of pocket, as the one-off donations should never have been made in the first place, it said it had lost “a huge amount of time in administration” by having to assist in the refund of over a thousand credit card transactions.
Irwin said this had been “the real cost” to Jack & Jill.
“We never factored these payments into our budget. These were fake donations that were never meant for us, but part of a skimming racket,” Irwin said.
However, it is sad to think about all the home nursing hours, over 8,000 in fact, that €130,000 would fund for sick children in every community in Ireland.It’s tough for every charity out there, and a credit card scam like this is cruel and very time consuming.
Irwin insisted the charity’s website was still secure and that anyone who had made a legitimate payment was not affected.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say