Irish foundation warns of fake grant offers
Howard Lake | 16 April 2019 | News
The Atlantic Philanthropies has issued a warning about a phishing scam currently circulating online claiming to come from a Fund representative or Chuck Feeney and requesting that recipients provide personal information in order to receive funding.
Atlantic Philanthropies (AP) says these emails are not official communications and should be disregarded and organisations should not send money or provide any personal or bank account information.
AP made its final grant commitments in December 2016 and has no more money to award. AP says even when they were actively making grants, Chuck Feeney, the foundation and its representatives never randomly offered people money or asked them to send money.
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AP says there are a number of versions of the email and social media messages (including Facebook messenger). One example provided is an email purportedly from Chuck Feeney offering to give $12,500,000 USD to randomly selected individuals:
“Hi,
My name is Chuck Feeney, I am a philanthropist and the founder of The Atlantic Philanthropies, one of the largest private foundations in the world. I believe strongly in “giving while living”. My philosophy about life is that you should use your wealth to help people and I have decided to secretly give $12,500,000.00 USD to randomly selected individuals around the Globe. On receipt of this email, you should count yourself one of the lucky recipients.
Kindly get back to me at your earliest convenience, so I know your email address is valid and furnish you with more information.
Visit the web page to know more about me: https://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/chuck-feeneys-story
Regards,
Sir. Chuck Feeney
Other emails claim to be coming from AP’s chief executive Christopher Oechsli and offering $1 million ‘to randomly selected individuals.’ One of the emails purports to come from a UK arm of AP using the name Anthony Lloyd and offers £250,000. The UK office of AP has closed.
From the 1980s to 2016 AP provided grants in Ireland worth nearly $1.9 billion.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.