When I get spam from a charity asking specifically for donations I visit the website just to see what kind of organization would use spam to solicit contributions. In most cases it’s a scam. Bona fide charities would NEVER spam you.

So this morning I received the following email

Stop! Help us, we are in need!

We are a non-governmental and non-profit association “Stop ajutane suntem in nevoie”. Taking into account that Romania has been confronted with numerous major problems such as floods, poor children and pensioneers who cannot afford expensive medicines. We want your support to build new dwellings for those who lost them because of the disasters and new homes for the children of the streets where they can be fed and taken good care of.

If you want to help us please visit our website by clicking www.stopandhelpus.org.

Copyright © 2007 Stop ajutane suntem in nevoie
www.stopandhelpus.org All Rights Reserved .

The website www.stopandhelpus.org is a cheesy template site with lots of links and badly written copy. Seems to be run out of Romania which always rings alarm bells.

I checked the domain name and, as I suspected, the domain name was registered on 19th June 2007 (Yesterday!) [ding ding]

The domain registrar (the person who owns the domain name) is hidden by a proxy [ding ding ding]

On a side note, these privacy proxies are all very well, but they are used by scammers to slow down investigations of scam websites. I think I’ll send a copy of this to contact@myprivateregistration.com and see if they do anything.

Anyway, if you hadnt gathered by now, at best ‘stopandhelpus’ is a naive, slightly crummy new charity, staffed by good hearted but shady people or (as I think) they are an out and out scam.

W hatever you do, do not send any money to these scammers. I just hope that this post gets ‘out there’ soon enough so that anyone who searches for STOPANDHELPUS will find this page first.

contact@myprivateregistration.com