Tax Guru – Ker$tetter Letter

I just sent the following message to Snopes.com, my favorite scam debunker.

An alert for your readers:

Yesterday (9/10/05), we received a phone call that showed up as “Salvation Army  800-725-2769” on our caller ID.  My wife answered and the person claimed to be soliciting donations for the SA.  Being a suspicious person, my wife told the caller that we already donate directly and do not appreciate these calls.

I later did some checking on the web and confirmed that SA does not make outgoing calls soliciting donations, such as in this article:

 Legitimate relief groups will not make phone calls soliciting donations.

“Criminals do that,” said Kane County Assistant State’s Attorney Scott Larson. “The Red Cross doesn’t do that, the Salvation Army doesn’t do that.”

People who get calls asking for Hurricane Relief donations should simply say, “No thank you,” and hang up, Larson said.

You’ve been doing an excellent job covering scams from Hurricane Katrina; so I wanted to pass this along.

Kerry Kerstetter
Osage, Arkansas

The real Salvation Army website