The Women's Cancer Fund, which is also known as Cancer Recovery Foundation International, is facing a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly only spending 1% of $18.25 million of proceeds on the cancer patients it vowed to help.
“Between 2017 and 2022, Women’s Cancer Fund collected more than $18.25 million from generous donors, promising donors that their ‘gift [would] go to directly help cancer patients and their families who are in need’ to assist them with basic living expenses such as rent, utilities, and food for their children,” reads the lawsuit. “Those claims were deceptive and misleading.”
Related: FTC calls TurboTax 'deceptive' and bans a key part of its advertising
The lawsuit, which was filed on March 11 in a federal court in Houston, Texas, accuses the organization’s president, Gregory Anderson, for hiring fundraisers that used “false and misleading scripts,” that were approved by him, to lie to donors on the amount that would be given to cancer patients. Out of the $18.25 million that was donated to the fund, he allegedly only spent $194,809 to help cancer patients, $775,139 for himself and paid the for-profit fundraisers $15.55 million, with the remaining amount going to “overhead expenses.”
“He was solely responsible for Women’s Cancer Fund’s finances and had full knowledge that Women’s Cancer Fund was spending close to nothing on helping women with cancer, while compensating himself,” reads the lawsuit. “At Anderson’s direction, Women’s Cancer Fund lied to tens of thousands of generous donors about the good their charitable contributions would accomplish, effectively preventing millions of dollars from going to legitimate charities that would help women with cancer.”
MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images/Getty Images
The lawsuit also claims that Anderson signed contracts that promised that fundraisers would receive 85% to 95% of the total funds that were raised. Also, the board of directors of the Women’s Cancer Fund was allegedly made up of members that were all handpicked by Anderson and “provided little to no oversight of its operations.”
The FTC calls the Women's Cancer Fund a “sham charity” in the lawsuit, and 10 states have joined the complaint against the organization.
The amount of money consumers are losing from fraud is on the rise. According to the FTC, in 2022, Americans lost $8.8 billion to fraud, which is a 30% increase from 2021. The top fraud was imposter scams, which includes fake charities, and it resulted in consumers losing $2.6 billion total.
The alleged scheme ran from 2017 to 2022 when the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based charity, also known as Cancer Recovery Foundation International, sought to dissolve.
California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin joined the FTC lawsuit.
