That was then. Now, the airwaves are full of donate-your-car ads and the National Charities Information Bureau, a New York nonprofit, is warning auto-offering altruists to beware of scams. In the worst cases, unlicensed used-car dealers are setting themselves up as charities, selling old vehicles without proper inspections or tags, putting bad cars on the road and pocketing the money. Drivers who thought they had seen the last of Old Bessie are getting parking tickets months after their “donations.” California shut down one such dealer who’d established a bogus charity and pocketed $750,000 before it caught up with him.
Even good charities can fall short if they turn over their used-car processing to an intermediary that takes most of the cash. Belinda Johns, California’s assistant attorney general, says that in 1997 charities kept a mere $5 million of the $24 million raised from car donations. So unless you’ve checked under the hood of the charity you want to donate to, you might just want to put the old heap up on blocks.
