An Unregistered Sandy Relief Fund Raised Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars...Got Caught

by Gary Snyder

An unregistered Hurricane Sandy charity ended up actually donating a good chunk of the money that it raised—due to the intervention of the state government. 

A couple in Sparta, New Jersey adopted a great name for a disaster relief charity—the Hurricane Sandy Relief Foundation—and raised $334,000, but their organization was never a 501(c)(3). All the donor-education information produced by nonprofits doesn’t necessarily seem to have worked when it comes to preventing unregistered nonprofits from raising huge amounts of money under the guise of disaster relief.

One of the two founders, John Sandberg, told the Star-Ledger by e-mail that the organization distributed over $500,000 in goods throughout the tri-state area affected by the Hurricane. An AG’s court-appointed administrator, however, just recently awarded four grants totaling $225,000 of the Foundation’s money to O.C.E.A.N. in Toms River (which is building single-family homes), a food bank in Neptune to assist in rebuilding its food pantries, the Alliance Center for Independence in Edison for post-Sandy projects to help people with disabilities, and a fourth group in Rockaway, N.Y., called Graybeards. The court administrator plans to award another $100,000 soon.

According to the complaint filed by the Division of Consumer Affairs, Sandberg and Terraccino were no slouches. One day before the state’s emergency order and three days before Hurricane Sandy actually hit, Sandberg registered 110 Sandy/Relief domain names including words like “Sandy,” “Relief,” “New Jersey,” and “Fund.” (This wasn’t his first time; he did it 2011, too, registering domain names in Hawaii after a tsunami hit the islands.) In setting up his Hurricane Sandy website, Sandberg coded the site so that it would outrank other similar organizations in Google searches.

This shows how easy to convince donors to donate generously during times of emergency and disaster even if the charity isn’t on the level. In this case, the state government was on top of this situation within months, but that didn’t stop the group from raising more than half a million under the guise of disaster relief. (source)

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