Bhubaneshwar, May 2021: Citizens all over the country have been receiving calls, messages, emails, and letters asking every reader to donate to charities like “Save the children” or “Save the Indigenous communities” or “Save the affected”. CBI Bhubaneshwar has cracked into the headquarters of one such “charity” NGO conducting their business out of an abandoned building in the Rokat neighbourhood. “The headquarters had no certified community workers. It was run entirely by marketing enthusiasts,” said CBI Inspector Reddy.
A team of cross-department government officials is now investigating and auditing the financials of the NGO which ran the “Save the children” campaign. Many such NGOs and campaigns are thought to be linked and are rumoured to be equally as dubious. The manhunt to find them all continues.
Independent investigative journalists have found that there are no children that have been saved and that all the images on their website, posters, and social media pages were procured from a Swedish photographer on tour in urban Mumbai.
“We don’t have any assets or any workforce,” said the whistleblower who brought the “charity” to the attention of the CBI. “We just have volunteers. Initially we wanted to raise some money to start the project. So, we went around to the local colleges with some stock images on some posters and got a bunch of volunteers. But slowly it became clear that it was way way (sic) easier to just recruit volunteers than actually raise money.”
Most volunteers joined the NGO in order to have the satisfaction of having worked for the well-being of the society at large. Most volunteers, though, were extremely bad at raising money. In a few months, the official policy was altered so that each volunteer had to either raise ₹50k or 50 new volunteers each month.
“We wanted to do good,” continued the whistleblower. “But the money and the volunteers kept pouring in and we didn’t even have to do anything. The team just kept on thinking of more ways to raise money than to actually use the money for anything. That is when it all went wrong.”
Initial reports of the NGO team’s arrests claimed it all to be a pyramid scheme. The NGO chairman has since claimed that it is a false accusation and has tried to clear it. “No, it is not a pyramid scheme,” said the chairman. “We don’t give any of the money to the early volunteers. The volunteers join in because they want to. They want to feel that they are contributing to society. That experience. That is what we are offering to the people. The money is just a by-product.”
Fraud experts are conflicted in whether this is a pyramid scheme, a Ponzi scheme, or neither. With Multi-Level Marketing being a legal and well-accepted business model, proving fraud appears even more challenging.
Meanwhile, the government has seen to it that the network of volunteers used by the now dissolved NGOs does not go to waste and that the volunteers are instead used to raise funds for PM CARES. PMO has also clarified that expenditure of funds raised this way will not be made public either.