How to Avoid Crypto Donation Scams: Checks to Run Before You Send

Every surge in public sympathy is followed within days by a surge in fraudulent appeals, and crypto is the fraudster's preferred rail for one reason: a sent transaction cannot be recalled. There is no chargeback, no bank to appeal to, no processor to freeze the funds. The checks therefore have to happen before you press send, and they take about four minutes.

We publish wallet addresses ourselves, so we have an obvious interest here. The checks below are the ones we would want a donor to run on us.

The checks that actually catch fraud

In rough order of how often they catch something:

• Get the address from the organisation's own website, typed into your browser — never from a reply, a direct message, a comment, a QR code in a video, or a forwarded screenshot. This single habit defeats most crypto charity fraud.
• Check the domain character by character. Fraudulent clones rely on a swapped letter, an extra hyphen, or a different ending. Compare it against the organisation's verified social profiles.
• Confirm the site is served over HTTPS and that the wallet address appears on a page you navigated to yourself, not one you were linked to.
• Look up the address on a block explorer before sending. A wallet used by a working charity has a history of many incoming transfers over time. A wallet that is empty, brand new, or shows a single large outgoing sweep is a warning.
• Look for a named legal entity, a physical address and a way to reach a human. Fraudulent appeals are fluent about suffering and vague about who they are.
• Be sceptical of urgency that outruns detail — a countdown, a matching-donation deadline, a plea to send within the hour. Real emergencies do not require you to skip verification.

The address-swap attack, and why it works

The most effective scam is not a fake charity at all. It is a real appeal with a substituted wallet address, circulated as a screenshot or pasted into a comment thread under a genuine organisation's post. Donors recognise the cause, recognise the logo, and never think to check the forty characters in the middle.

There is also malware that watches your clipboard and silently replaces a copied crypto address with the attacker's. It is why the advice to check the first and last characters after pasting is not fussiness — it is the only defence against an attack you cannot see.

What a legitimate crypto appeal looks like

A charity that takes crypto seriously will tell you which networks each address belongs to, because sending on the wrong chain loses the funds. It will explain what happens after the transfer — who converts it, and into what. It will give you a way to report your transaction so the gift can be receipted rather than vanishing into an anonymous balance.

It will also be honest about the limits. No organisation can guarantee the exact fiat value of a volatile donation, and any appeal promising that every last unit reaches a beneficiary with no conversion cost, no fee and no overhead is describing something that does not exist.

If you have already sent to a fraudulent address

The transfer cannot be reversed, and anyone who contacts you offering to recover it for a fee is running the second half of the same scam. Recovery services that demand an upfront payment in crypto are, without exception, fraud.

What is still worth doing: report the address to the exchange you sent from, report it to your national fraud reporting body, and report it publicly so the address is flagged for the next person. Then tell the organisation that was impersonated — they can warn their supporters, which is the part that actually prevents the next loss.

Checking us

Donation addresses are only ever created on our donation page, a fresh one for each gift you start there. We will never message you a wallet address, and never ask for a transfer to be completed within a deadline. If you see any of those things attributed to us, it is not us — and we would like to know about it.

If you want to verify a transfer before giving at scale, send a small amount first and use the reporting form on our donation page. We will confirm receipt against the transaction hash.