Thousands in nonprofit donations gone

Ulster’s United Way missing thousands of dollars in donations

KINGSTON, N.Y. >> The United Way of Ulster County is apparently out more than $4,000 in donations after a company that processed charitable contributions for it and hundreds of other nonprofit organizations across the state closed shop without warning — and without turning over to the organizations the monies raised in their name.

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Wednesday that her office has launched an investigation into NYCharities.org, the online fundraising platform used for more than a decade by charitable organizations.

“NYCharities.org is inexcusably depriving charities of their donors’ generosity,” James said in a press release. “Leaving New York’s charitable organizations high and dry by denying them what they are owed is unacceptable.”

The investigation comes after more than 100 organizations and individuals complained they had not received contributions ranging from $200 to over $100,000 made through NYCharities.org.

Stacey Rein, the executive director of the United Way of Ulster County, said the health and human services agency is out $4,500, which was half the money raised as part of the agency’s Celebration of HOPE fundraiser held on June 7.

The Raising HOPE program is a mentoring program that helps women by connecting them with mentors and providing financial assistance to help them reach their academic and personal goals.

“That’s money that we used primarily in the Raising HOPE program to provide college or vocational training scholarships and financial assistance,” said Rein. “We’ll have less to give out. That’s the thing. We’ll have less to give out.”

“It actually can impact how many scholarships we give out, how much financial assistance we can provide,” she said.

She said the missing funds account for between 40 and 45 individual donations.

For the past 10 years, the United Way of Ulster County used NYCharities.org as the primary vehicle for people and businesses to register to attend or sponsor events and to make online donations, Rein said, adding that “99 percent of the people who register or sponsor an event would to it through NYCharities.”

But in April, with the agency in the midst of accepting reservations for its June 7 fundraiser, the United Way’s chief financial officer began to notice that donations and donation reports from NYCharities.org were coming in slower than usual.

“Then there was nothing in May,” she said.

For several weeks, Rein said, United Way staff attempted to contact NYCharities.org to no avail.

“Then you couldn’t even get on their website,” she said. “There was no way to contact them.

“By the end of May we realized something bad was going on,” she said.

Rein said the agency filed a complaint with the Attorney General and removed NYCharities.org from the United Way website, replacing it with “QGive,” another online contributions portal.

Attempts to reach NYCharities.org and its founder and president, Cristine Cronin, were unsuccessful. A call to the company’s New York City headquarters was met with a generic computer-generated message stating that “no one is available to take your call.” The organization’s website was down on Wednesday. Although a Facebook page was still visible, no posts to the page had been made since 2018. According to Guidestar, a database to nonprofits, NYCharities.org’s status as a 501c3 nonprofit was revoked earlier this year because it failed to file federal tax returns for the past three years.

On its Facebook page, NYCharities.org described itself as “a free, online contributions portal, which is dedicated to increasing charitable dollars from donors to New York causes, and providing information on New York State’s 98,000 charities.”

To submit a complaint about NYCharities.org, send an email to charities.complaints@ag.ny.gov, or by call (800) 771-7755.