I’ve had run-ins of varying magnitude about this with numerous organizations over the years. The ones that I post about here are the worst of the worst. They have either overtly refused to accommodate my requests, or claimed repeatedly, but falsely, that they had done so.

Today, I am forced to add Yad Sarah to this disreputable bunch. I am sorry to do this, because the work Yad Sarah claims to do is important, and because they appear to be respected by other organizations which I respect and tend to trust. However, after my experience with them, I must wonder how efficiently and effectively they use the money entrusted to them by donors to perform their mission.

I have had to ask Yad Sarah to stop spamming me on no less than four separate occasions, in July 2004, August 2004, May 2005, and most recently July 2010. Each time I made the request, they claimed that it had been acted upon. Each of the first three times, it turned out that it had not. Although I give them credit for managing to stop spamming me for over five years after my May 2005 request, I must ask which part of “You must remove my e-mail address from any and all of your mailing lists, immediately and permanently,” which is what I wrote to them in July 2004, they are incapable of understanding.

I had similar trouble getting their American fundraising arm, Friends of Yad Sarah, to remove me from their postal mailing list. I wrote to them on three separate occasions, first by email and then twice by fax, before I finally got a response. The person who responded claimed, “This is the first request we received,” which means that either she was comfortable implying that a donor is a liar, or the organization is so shoddily run that they lose track on a regular basis of attempts by donors to contact them. At least they seem to have done the right thing when they finally responded — I haven’t received any junk mail from them since April 2009.

I encourage those who value Yad Sarah’s work and might choose to support them to seek out better run organizations that will put your money to better use.

Alas, there are a few organizations whose bulk email practices are so disreputable, so shameful, so entirely unacceptable, that when all else fails, my only remaining recourse is to attempt to shame them into cleaning up their act, and to urge others not to support them financially until they’ve done so.

Today, I am forced to condemn the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) to the charity spammers’ hall of shame.

AFB spammed me in December 2007 after I gave them my email address when donating on-line.  I sent them email, asked them to stop sending me bulk email, and informed them that if they did not do so, I would have no choice but to remove them from the list of organizations I support.  They did not respond.

They spammed me again in August 2008.  I complained again.  They did not respond.

They spammed me again later that month.  I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.  They did not respond.

They spammed me again in January 2009.  I filed a complaint through SpamCop.  They did not respond.

They spammed me again in June 2009.  I followed the instructions in the spam for unsubscribing and again complained through SpamCop.  They did not respond.

They spammed me again today, with the same unsubscribe instructions (i.e., the instructions that I followed last time but obviously did not work) in their message.

After I publish this blog posting, I will be once again asking them to unsubscribe, this time in an email message sent to every single email address on their Web site’s “contact us” page which will include a link to my blog.  I will also once again be filing a complaint through SpamCop.  I’m not holding out much hope that any of this will actually work.

Either the people who run this organization are monumentally incompetent, or they think it’s completely OK to spam their donors, ignore unsubscribe requests, and publish unsubscribe instructions that don’t actually do anything.  Reputable organizations do not act this way.  Organizations which act this way cannot be relied upon to use wisely the funds entrusted to them by donors.  I therefore strongly urge people to find somewhere else to send their charity dollars.

UPDATE: I received the following response from AFB 41 minutes after I sent my email to everyone on their “contact us” page and told them I had outed them on my blog:

Be assured you will be removed today and will no longer receive emails from AFB. We recently discovered a glitch in our email list updating function that re-added unsubscribe and wrong addresses. I am pleased to report that we have fixed that error and now once a donor asks to be removed they will be removed forever.

My apologies that it took us a while to figure out the problem.

I leave it to my readers to decide for themselves whether this is an adequate response or “too little too late.”  Personally, I’m going to go with the latter.

At the core of the health care controversy is the question of whether health care is a basic right held by every American citizen…  We all need food, clothing and shelter.  Are these basic rights too? …  The truth is that these things are not rights and neither is health care.

I found her letter so astoundingly offensive that I had to write a response.  Unfortunately, the Herald printed neither my response nor any other objecting to Giroux’s assertion that food, clothing and shelter are not basic rights.  Perhaps this is because they felt the issue had already played itself out, or perhaps it’s because they agree with Giroux, or perhaps it’s because they didn’t think my letter was controversial enough, or perhaps they think they’ve printed too many letters from me recently .  In any case, here’s what I wrote:

To the editor:

Attempting to contrast with the right to health care, Christine Giroux asks, “We all need food, clothing and shelter. Are these basic rights too?”

According to the millennia-old traditions and ethical code observed by me and my fellow Jews, the answer is clear and unequivocal: yes, of course they are!

Supporting the poor is not merely something to do if one feels like it. It is an obligation placed both on individuals and on the community (i.e., the government). Not only is it a good deed to support the poor; it is a grave sin against man and God to do otherwise.

While I would not presume to speak for other religions, I find it difficult to understand how many who deny these basic rights profess to follow a religion whose holy texts teach, “Let the man with two tunics share with him who has none, and let him who has food do likewise,” and, “If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor.”

American culture encourages the mistaken beliefs that poverty can be eliminated and that the poor are responsible for their own condition. While that may be true for some, the truth is that there will always be people who need the help of others, and help them we must.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens
Brighton

This year, we will present the Adbook [sic] in an exciting new virtual (electronic) format. Rather than a printed book, the Adbook contents will be presented during the Gala both as a mural display and as a projected video slideshow, which will later appear on the school’s website.  Advertisers will also receive a high-quality printed sheet of their own ads. This Virtual Adbook is a move toward better environmental stewardship, helping us conserve more of Earth’s precious resources…

This raises a whole host of questions in my mind.  For example:

• Do private individuals who buy ads in these ad books, especially the big, expensive ads, do so at least in part because they want other people to know how generous (read “rich”) they are (otherwise, wouldn’t they just send a check and forget about the ad)?
• Do businesses which buy ads in these ad books do so at least in part because they want people to see that they are supporting the institution and they hope to receive some sort of quid pro quo in the form of increased patronage from other supporters?
  • If so, can they subtract the cost of the ad from their gross as a business expense to reduce their taxes?
  • Do businesses really see increased patronage as the result of buying an ad?  If so, then eliminating the printed ad book will certainly make it harder to convince businesses to buy ads.
• How are people going to relieve the boredom of all the speeches at the dinner by flipping through the ad book to see who coughed up the big bucks, when there are no printed copies at people’s tables?
• Realistically, do people ever look at the printed ad book for a fundraiser once the fundraiser is over?
• Realistically, is there any chance at all that people will visit a “virtual ad book” on a Web site?

I’m all for reducing wasted paper and ink and for using money raised by a non-profit for better things than printing ad books that no one will ever read, but it seems to me that this “virtual ad book” idea is going to make it decidedly more difficult to sell ads, and I can’t help but suspect that the end result will be a decrease in net proceeds over a printed book.

They have sent me spam on November 5, 2004; December 22, 2004; January 11, 2005; December 7, 2005; December 20, 2005; March 8, 2006; May 11, 2006; May 28, 2007; and November 4, 2008.

I have complained to them about the spam on November 7, 2004; January 9, 2005; December 8, 2005; May 28, 2007, and November 4, 2008.  The one and only response I received was on January 11, 2005, when they apologized and claimed (falsely) that the spam would stop.

The American Institute Philanthropy gives Operation Smile a grade of rating of “D” (on an ABCDF scale).  In contrast, Smile Train, another charity which does similar work, gets a “B-” grade.

Because of their poor grade and their penchant for spamming, I strongly discourage people from providing any support, financial or otherwise, to Operation Smile.

The main strategy I use for this is, quite simply, to ask the organizations that send me junk mail to stop, and to escalate my request when it goes unheeded.  In extreme cases, where the escalation is also ignored, I complain to the Better Business Bureau.

This pretty much always works.  I have never encountered an organization which has ignored all of my requests and even the BBB complaint.  Until now, that is.

The first an only (thus far) organization to completely ignore all of my requests and even my BBB complaint is a Jewish charity, American Friends of Tzohar.  AFT is the American fund-raising arm of a special-needs school in Israel.  Or, at least, that’s what it purports to be.  The odd thing is that the Tzohar school itself doesn’t have a Web site — only AFT does.  Furthermore, courtesy of Google Maps Street View, here’s the building located at 1431 Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, this organization’s supposed address:

I have asked AFT five times since December 6, 2007 to remove me from their mailing list.  I’ve sent my requests by email and fax.  I finally complained to the Better Business Bureau about them on July 2, 2008.

Since I first asked them to stop sending me junk mail, I have received five mailings from them, including one on September 15, 2008, more than two months after I filed the BBB complaint.

AFT has not responded in any way to any of my requests or to my BBB complaint.

Through their actions, they have left me no choice but to publicly shame them into changing their behavior.  By continuing to send me junk mail which I have told them I do not want, they have proven two things:

1. They are incompetent, because they cannot handle the simple task of maintaining a mailing list in an appropriate fashion, something which virtually every other charity I’ve dealt with is capable of doing.
2. They don’t care about wasting money.  How else can you explain the fact that they keep sending mailings to me when I’ve asked them to stop and clearly I’m not going to respond by sending a donation.

I encourage anyone who is solicited by this charity to ignore said solicitation and send your money to a more worthy organization.

Do you throw most of it away?

Do you know how bad for the environment it is?  Cutting down trees, manufacturing paper, manufacturing ink, printing junk, transporting it to its recipients, and disposing of or recycling it all add up to a huge waste.

Do you know what a time-waster it is?  Looking at each piece to decide whether it’s junk, opening the ones that fool you, and discarding it all may take only a few seconds per piece, but when you add up all those seconds, it comes out to quite a lot of wasted time!

I was once in the same boat.  Six days a week, my mailbox was flooded with junk, which far exceeded the useful stuff, and a day without any mail at all was simply unheard of.

But now, I go for weeks without seeing any junk, and our mail carrier is spared the walk up our porch stairs at least once a week.  Putting a stop to the junk isn’t rocket science.  It takes some effort, but it’s worth it.  And I’m going to tell you exactly how to do it.

Go to the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service, right now, and register every member of your family to opt out of all junk.  The DMA’s Web site will try to talk you out of it, but don’t listen.  Tell the DMA’s members loud and clear to take their junk and shove it.

Alas, that’s not the end of it; if only it were that easy!  Many junkers don’t belong to the DMA.  Others think they’re allowed to junk you because you’ve done business with them before.  It’s harder to get rid of these; harder, but not impossible.

But hold on!  Before you do any more to eliminate the junk, wait 90 days after registering your family with the DMA MPS. It takes that long for your registration to kick in, and why should you waste time getting yourself removed from lists that you’ll be removed from automatically within a few months?  Go stick a reminder in your on-line calendar to start the next phase of the battle in three months, and include a link to this article so you know what to do when the time comes.

What to do, in a nutshell, is this: contact every single junker and tell them to remove you from their list.

You probably think that will be pretty time-consuming.  You’re right, it will be, at least at first.  You’ll go from a few seconds per junk piece to anywhere from a couple of minutes to half an hour.  However, in the end it will be worth it.

Over time the junk will slow to a trickle.  There will be days when you don’t receive a single piece of mail.  Your time investment will eventually pay off.

Furthermore, you’re not just doing this to save time — you’re also doing it to save the environment.  If you doubt that it’ll have a significant impact, save the junk you receive for a few months, and you’ll be convinced!

Here, in detail, is how you should proceed with each piece of junk you receive.  Read through the whole thing before you get started, so that you’re familiar with the entire process (in particular, the “Keeping Records” section is important).  It’s easier than it looks, and you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

If you decide to take on the junkers as I describe below, please send me email or post a comment and let me know how it goes!

Step 1: Triage

Have you already asked the junker to remove you from their list?  If not, then proceed to “Step 2: Request”.

Has it been long enough since you asked that they should have complied by now?  if not, then proceed to “Step 3: Return”.

Have you already escalated?  If not, then proceed to “Step 4: Escalate”.

Has it been long enough since you escalated that they should have complied by now?  If not, then proceed to “Step 3: Return”.

Have you already filed a complaint with the BBB?  If not, then proceed to “Step 5: Complain”.

If you’ve already filed a complaint with the BBB, then give up — this particular junker just isn’t going to listen.  Note: I’ve been telling junkers to leave me alone for almost a year, and I have not yet encountered a single junker who persisted after a BBB complaint.

Step 2: Request

The goal is to contact the junker and ask them to remove you from their mailing list, as quickly as possible and without costing you any money.  Here are the methods you can use, in order of preference:

1. Prepaid return mail, if they enclosed a prepaid envelope in their mailing to you
2. Email
3. Web form
4. Fax (if their fax number is toll-free or you don’t pay per minute for long distance)
5. Phone (ditto)

Prepaid return mail

Sending back the junk in a prepaid return mail envelope is the least time-consuming method, because it does not require you to try to figure out how to contact the junker.  It is also the most satisfying, because it actually costs them money.  Therefore, if there is a prepaid return envelope, then write, “Remove me from your mailing list,” on every piece of paper in the junk, especially the ones with your name and address on it; stuff them all in the prepaid return envelope; seal it up; and drop it in the mail.

Email

If you’re lucky, the sender has included an email address somewhere in the junk.  If so, then just fire off an email message to that address.  Include the following:

1. “Please remove me from your postal mailing list and do not give or sell my mailing address to anyone else.”
2. Include your name and address exactly as it appears on the junk.
3. If there’s a customer number or other obviously identifiable code which represents you, then include that as well.
4. If there’s a string of random numbers and characters below or next to your address on the junk, then include that as well.
5. “Please do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this message.”  Yes, you really have to say this.  Yes, some obnoxious organizations will ignore it, and then you’ll have to deal with unsubscribing from their email spam.  If you are concerned about this, then consider using a free, throwaway email account from Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.  When the amount of spam being sent to that account gets to be too much, you can simply close it and create a new one.

If there’s no email address in the junk, then visit the sender’s Web site and try to find one there (the URL is usually included in the junk, but if not, you can Google for it).  Look on the home page, or on the “Contact Us”, “Customer Service” or “Privacy Policy” pages.

If you try to contact the junker using an email address they’ve provided, and it bounces, then proceed as if no email address was available, and mention the invalid address when you complain using a different method.

Web form

If, rather than providing an email address, the sender provides a form on their Web site for you to fill out to contact them, go ahead and use it, providing the information listed above.

Fax

Look for a fax number on the junk or Web site.  Fax a short note to that number with the information listed above.  To save time, consider writing the information on a sticky note, sticking it to the junk in a way that leaves your name, address and customer codes visible, and faxing that instead of a note written completely from scratch.

Phone

Look for a phone number on the junk or Web site.

Complaining by phone is a last resort because it’s time-consuming and unlikely to work.  You’ll end up waiting on hold, getting bounced from person to person or from menu to menu, and having to spell your name and address slowly enough for the droid on the other end of the line to get it right.  In the end, there’s a good chance they’ll mess it up anyway.

If all else fails

If you can’t contact the junker using any of these methods, then proceed to “Step 5: Complain”.

Make sure you mention in your BBB complaint that you’ve been forced to go through the BBB because the sender provided no other way to contact them.

Step 3: Return

Whenever you receive junk mail with a prepaid return envelope, send it back as described above in “Prepaid return mail”.

As noted above, this can serve as your initial unsubscribe request to the junker, but you should do it for every single piece of junk you receive, even if you’ve already done it before, and even if you’re also going to contact the junker in some other way.

Indiscriminate junk mail exists because it is profitable.  If people like you and me do our part to make it less profitable, then we’re helping to eliminate it not just for us, but for everyone.  Sending back junk in its prepaid return envelope is therefore an easy, effective form of civil disobedience.

Step 4: Escalate

When you’ve already asked once for a junker to stop sending you junk, and you’ve waited long enough for the request to kick in (as long as they told you to wait, if they responded to your request, or six weeks otherwise), and you get another piece of junk from them, it’s time to escalate your request.

To do that, follow the procedure described above in “Step 2: Request”, with these changes:

1. Use a different method of contacting them from the one you used before (unless the one you’ve already used is the only one available).
2. Tell them that this is your second request, and give them the details of the last one (exactly how and when you last contacted them).
3. Tell them how many mailings you’ve received since your first request, and when you received them.
4. If you’ve been sending their mailings back in prepaid return envelopes with “please remove me” written on them, then tell them so.

Step 5: Complain

If you’ve asked the sender twice to remove you from their mailing list, and you’ve waited long enough for them to do so after both requests, then it’s time to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau through their complaint site.  Provide the information listed above in “Step 2: Request” and “Step 4: Escalate”, carefully documented all of your interaction with the junker — the dates of their mailings to you, and the dates and methods you’ve used to ask them to stop sending them.

Filing a BBB complaint requires knowing the junker’s address and phone number.  These will almost always be provided somewhere in the junk.  If not, you can find them on the Web site, or you can search the BBB’s database for the junker’s name or telephone number.

Every single junk complaint I have filed with the BBB has been successful at stopping the junk.

Keeping Records

Throughout this process, you should keep detailed records of your interactions with all the junkers.  The easiest way to do this is to keep a text file or spreadsheet on your desktop, and to update it each time you receive junk or take any of the steps described above.  If you’d like, you can use this spreadsheet.

There are several reasons why keeping detailed records is important:

1. When you receive junk, you need to know whether you’ve complained to its junker before and whether it’s been long enough that they should have stopped junking you by now.
2. For all of your complaints to the junker or BBB after the initial request, you need to be able to document your previous requests and exactly when you’ve received junk despite them.  This makes it clear that you are serious about stopping the junk and aren’t going to take no for an answer.
3. If you’re anything like me, you will enjoy watching the frequency of junk go down drastically after you’ve been doing this for a few months.  It’ll be obvious from the daily contents of your mailbox, but you may also enjoy being able to precisely quantify it (and maybe even draw pretty graphs!).

Pretty graph

In October 2007, I started complaining about junk as described above.  Here’s the volume of junk I’ve received since then (with the partial month of October omitted):

The “humps” in December and April are due to the fact that charities do more mailings at those times of year because it’s when people are thinking about donating money to charity to save money on their taxes.

Bill McCollum
Attorney General
The Capital PL-01
Tallahassee, FL  32399-1050
E-mail: ag.mccollum@myfloridalegal.com

Dear Mr. McCollum:

I am writing to bring to your attention a fraudulent charity that is operating out of Florida and scamming well-meaning individuals.

I received a solicitation yesterday for an organization calling itself “Macular Degeneration Association” and which identifies itself as “a mission of,” i.e., a front for, the “American Medical Research Organization”.  The address given for the organization is 420 Beach Road, P.O. Box 20256, Sarasota, FL  34276, and the telephone number given is 941-870-4399.  The charity claims to be registered in Florida with the registration number CH18753.

Here is how I know that this organization is a scam:

• There is no presence on the Web for the “Macular Degeneration Association” or the “American Medical Research Organization”.  No reputable charity operates without a Web site.
• The solicitation provides no email address for contacting the organization.  Again, reputable charities always provide a mechanism for contacting them on-line.
• The telephone number is bogus.
• The mailing address is a condominium or apartment building, not an office.
• There is no evidence on the Web that any organization or researcher receives any financial support from this either MDA or AMRO.
• The organization does not appear to have either a board of directors or endorsements from any medical professionals.
• The president of the organization according to the solicitation letter, Michael Alicea, does not appear to be any sort of medical professional.  The only evidence I could find on the Web for what he does with his time seems to suggest that he spends quite a bit of it visiting night clubs in the Sarasota area.
• The contact for the organization listed on its IRS Form 990, Lawrence Hoffheimer, also is not any sort of medical professional; it appears that he is a lawyer.
• There is no indication in the solicitation letter of how the organization spends the money it raises.
• The organization has not been evaluated or rated by the American Institute of Philanthropy.
• The solicitation letter engages in the known tactic of slipping in a little piece of “educational material” at the end of the letter, “P.S. Be sure and make regular eye examinations a regular part of your efforts to maintain a health lifestyle”, so that the cost of the solicitation can be counted as a “program expense” on the organization’s financial reports.

If you investigate this organization more closely, you will almost certainly find that virtually all of its “program expenses” consist of the cost of sending out fundraising letters, and that the rest of the money it raises is used almost entirely to pay salaries to Michael Alicea and others affiliated with the organization.

Please put a stop to this fraudulent activity.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

CC: Martha Coakley, Attorney General
    Commonwealth of Massachusetts
    E-mail: ago@state.ma.us

CC:    Daniel Borochoff, President
    American Institute of Philanthropy
    E-mail: aipmail@charitywatch.org

CC:    MacDonald Curran, Chairman
    AMD Alliance International
    E-mail: info@amdalliance.org

CC:    Chip Goehring, President
    American Macular Degeneration Foundation
    E-mail: amdf@macular.org

CC: Edmund J. Aleksandrovich, President
    Macular Degeneration Foundation
    E-mail: ed@eyesight.org