Peace and Goodwill to all Men – Pah!

By Ashley Fulwood

Today is Christmas Eve and much of my day as been spent talking to the police following another attempt to defraud our charity bank account! Yep, you are reading me right! Earlier in the Summer we found two mysterious amounts had been taken from our bank account, and then this week our bank wrote to us to decline the setting up of a Standing Order from our account because it did not quite meet with the instruction we had given our bank for our account. It turns out that someone was trying to setup a Standing Order from our account for £96 weekly for three weeks over Christmas, just small amounts which would not get noticed during the Christmas period with statement delays etc.

Can you believe that someone would actually try and steal from a charity? It’s certainly making me less full of Christmas joy and glee I can tell you. Humbug anyone?
Thankfully our bank protects us and on each of the three occasions that it has happened we have been refunded our money that you our members have worked so hard to donate. This in itself is a problem because the Police refuse to investigate on our instruction because we have not lost out, the bank have. The bank doesn’t seem to care because it is such a small amount. However, what they do not appreciate is that on each occasion it does cost our charity time and money in phone calls, and at least a couple of hours of my time is spent writing reports, talking to the banks and police which could be better spent helping our community or developing the charity.

We are also the victim of fraud in another unusual way too, often criminals who have stolen bank or card details will make small donations of £5-£10 to charities to test the card works before they then go on to spend bigger. Our own charity debit card was used to make a £10 donation to Oxfam in the Summer and then we have also received small donations from people which later turn out to be not genuine. This then leads to the credit card company trying to take the money back of us, and often our online transaction provider, RBS Worldpay then try and charge us £10 admin fee called a Chargeback fee. Thankfully that situation has only happened twice, but again it shows that fraudsters are really using Charities for their own means.

 The downside of this is that now if OCD-UK receive an unusual donation I have to email the donater just to check it is genuine, how sad is that?  (please don’t let that put you off donating though, we really do need your support), and you can always email us when you donate to let us know, in fact I would love to hear from you anyway if you are kind enough to donate, it gives me the opportunity to thank you much more personally.

At the end of the day OCD-UK is protected by the bank, but what it means is I have to check our statements on a weekly basis, so it simply adds additional workload to my time, so I guess it does cost the charity in that respect.

This is just one of the many unusual jobs that I have to deal with here at OCD-UK towers on a regular basis.

I am now running out of Humbugs.. Christmas seasonal joy to one and all? Pah,  not going to let the low life *Bleep Bleep* steal my Christmas joy too… so wishing all the charities friends and supports a very Happy Christmas and I look forward to working with you all in 2010.

From a nearly Scrooge like Ashley.