I went back on Archive.org, and it does seem to be the case that they've been up front about their religious affiliation (online) at least since 2013, when I stopped looking.

The pitch K4K has had for most of this time isn't about the good that they do so much as that they're very good at picking up your car conveniently and maximizing the IRS impact of the donation.

(Donating your car is probably not a good deal and you might be better off just having it bought and picked up by a salvager, and then taking the money and donating that.)

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dec0dedab0de 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People donating things aren't generally looking for a good deal.

I don't really care about the religious aspect, but if you're calling yourself kars4kids, the proceeds really should go to kids. In general, charities should have to be more up front about how their donations are being used. With rules being stricter as they get bigger. That is to say, the local fire department doesn't need to tell me how much of the hoagie sale is going to beer, but once you're buying commercials there should be some transparency.

As far as car donation options the purple heart is still around. I think at one point either the EFF or the FSF used to do it too, but I can't find it anywhere. Does anyone remember that?

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tptacek an hour ago | parent [-]

It does go to kids, it's just a religious charity for kids. That's an extremely normal thing. I'm Catholic, we have them too. And they're not hiding it.

I don't think it's a good donation! I wouldn't use it. Like I said, I'd junk the car and donate the proceeds.

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nostrademons 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Did you ever hear the jingle? [1]

The main issue is that it's a bunch of kids (~5-8yo) singing "1-877 cars for kids, K-A-R-S Kars 4 Kids, 1-877-KARS-4-Kids, donate your car today". Given its resemblance to preschool-age kids songs, and that it was a bunch of very young kids singing it, and that it played incessantly over California radio stations, many people thought that it was a charity funding local underprivileged kids of preschool/school age, not gap years for 17-18 year old NYC and NJ residents in Israel. They were always up-front on the website about what it is (presumably how they avoid fraud charges), but how many people are going to check the website when they have the 877 number burned in their brain?

If you look at the lawsuits against them, they almost all fit that pattern: someone (often elderly) who heard the kids singing on the radio, had a junk car, and figured they'd go help some underprivileged kids. Sure, always read the fine print, but the judge listened to the jingle and agreed that it was pretty misleading. So did other judges in Pennsylvania and Oregon.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8UV7SAhvG4&list=RDK8UV7SAhv...

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tyre 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think if you polled people donating, over 99.9% wouldn’t guess that it’s going to late-teens in a religious organization flying to Israel. I don’t even know that the 1/1000th person would guess.

You can’t hear the ads + see the billboards, compare it to where the money was going, and say in good faith that people thought that.

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pessimizer an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Just from personal experience, Catholics are better at this. Other religions often consider religious instruction a charitable function. Catholics just help you, and you're moved into wanting religious instruction.

When I would go to St. Vincent's as a homeless teenager, the only indication that I wasn't receiving services in some government office was the foot-high cross on the back wall. I don't remember a single mention of religion. Plenty of Protestant churches would make you sit through a service before feeding you.

edit: that's what I get for not reading the article before commenting. This is just fraudulent. It's a charity doing Zionist things for Jewish youth. Most non-Jewish people wouldn't donate to a kids' charity that wouldn't do a thing for their children if their children were needy. The only need it's attending to even in Jewish children is the "need" to love Israel and not enter into interfaith relationships.

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ofcrpls 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In the US, possibly yes. That’s not been their predilection elsewhere.

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tptacek 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is not all this charity --- I'm sure it's not an especially efficient charity --- does.

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aidenn0 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you saying that Catholic charities are more catholic in who they help?

	▲	dhosek 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Mostly. There are exceptions, like the Catholic adoption agencies wanting to discriminate against same sex couples in placements, but as far as using charity as a means to directly evangelize, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. A big part of that is also just a cultural aspect of Catholicism—we tend not to be big on the reaching out to people to join the church and there’s a tendency among Catholics to view themselves as members of an exclusive club rather than a party that there’s always room to bring in more people (the late Andrew Greeley commented on this in his book, The Catholic Myth and during a recent project that had me visiting a number of Chicago churches over the last year and as part of that viewing a lot of parish websites to check for Mass times, the numbers of parishes that had any indication on how to become Catholic at all was minimal (the vast majority assumed that you knew what RCIA/OCIA meant and I think I saw maybe a half dozen parishes that had the words “how to become Catholic” somewhere on their home page, all of which were predominantly Black parishes. On the other end of the spectrum, there were a handful of parishes where it was a challenge just to find an address and list of Mass times anywhere on them).

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SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That was back in the days when if you had mortgage interest, it was to your advantage to itemize deductions and include charitable donations. With the much higher standard deductions now, far fewer people file a Schedule A.

	▲	dhosek 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There’s also the cap on the deductibility of local taxes. The Trump tax “cut” raised my tax rate by roughly 3% (although I’ve tended to have lots of fluctuations in my income and deductions over the last 15 years so it’s hard to make good comparisons from one year to the next).

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StanislavPetrov 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

>and it does seem to be the case that they've been up front about their religious affiliation (online) at least since 2013, when I stopped looking.

If they were only soliciting funds on their website, which made it clear that your donation was being used to send 17 and 18 year olds to Israel, that would be a different story. In reality, the vast majority of their donations come in from people who are totally unaware because they hear the radio jingle, which is sung by little kids, and makes no mention of their religious affiliation or their affiliation with a foreign country. Here in New York I've been hearing these radio ads on a daily basis for literally decades and had no inkling about the true nature of this "charity" until today.