2026-07-07 · Raiden Team
Wanting to give is a good instinct. Scammers count on that instinct, which is why charity fraud tends to spike right after disasters, during the holidays, and whenever a cause is in the news. None of this means you should stop giving. It means it's worth knowing what to look for.
The easiest way to trick someone isn't to invent a fake cause — it's to borrow the name of a real one. A message asking you to give to "American Red Cross Relief Fund" or "St. Jude Children's Foundation" can sound close enough to a well-known organization that you don't stop to check. Scammers rely on that split-second of recognition.
Before giving, read the full name slowly. Search for it on its own, without the context of the message you received. If the organization barely has a web presence, or its website was registered a week ago, that's a signal to slow down.
Real disasters are urgent. Real charities are not, structurally, in the business of pressuring you. A message that insists you give "right now," that a "matching window closes in one hour," or that a friend "already gave and you're the last one" is using urgency to shut off your judgment, not to inform you.
Legitimate fundraising can have deadlines — a matching gift period, an end-of-year push — but it doesn't need to rush you past the basic step of checking who you're giving to. If something feels engineered to make you act before you think, that's the point, and it's worth resisting.
Every legitimate U.S. nonprofit has an Employer Identification Number (EIN) — a unique ID assigned by the IRS. Names can be copied. EINs are much harder to fake convincingly, and they're searchable. A real charity will list its EIN on its website, usually in the footer or an "about" or "financials" page. If a request for money can't produce one, that alone is reason to pause.
You can look up an EIN through the IRS's own tax-exempt organization search, or through any charity evaluator that indexes nonprofit filings. If the number doesn't match the name, or doesn't exist at all, stop there.
There are several well-established charity evaluator sites that compile public financial filings, rate transparency, and track how organizations spend what they raise. They're not identical to each other, and none of them is a perfect oracle — but checking one before giving to an organization you haven't heard of costs you two minutes and catches a lot of problems. We won't tell you which one to use; a quick search for "charity evaluator" will surface several credible options, and it's worth cross-checking more than one if a gift is large or the organization is unfamiliar.
A few smaller tells, none of them dispositive on their own but all worth weighing together:
Raiden doesn't ask you to evaluate anything mid-scroll. Your activity directs a share of Raiden's weekly giving to the charity you choose, and you set your giving split yourself, on your own schedule, disbursed through Every.org by the organization's IRS EIN. There's no urgency baked into the interface, no countdown timer, no stranger sliding into your messages asking you to act now. That's on purpose. Good giving decisions are rarely made in a hurry, and a platform that's actually built around giving shouldn't be trying to rush you either.
Skepticism isn't the opposite of generosity. It's what makes generosity land where you meant it to.
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