changes his story

I’m not going to defend or attack the guy, merely point out that facts. How much he knew and when is certainly up for debate, we just have limited evidence of that.

What we do have are facts, and those facts can certainly be used for cause for tht authorities to investigate.

His family also runs a golf tournament which was supposed to donate all the money they recive to his charity

That’s partially true. What we know is that his dad runs a golf tournament and put the Open Hand Foundation on the ads. Usually this means all proceeds go to the charity, or at least that they get the sponsorship money (i.e. merch and whatnot) according to the prices they have listed for sponsors, but we don’t have the actual agreement AFAIK between the tournament and the charity.

So there’s certainly enough to warrant an investigation, but not enough to actually prove any kind of crime. There does seem to be enough to prove negligence for holding onto the money for 10 years though, which should be enough to trigger a thorough audit, including alleged golf tournament income.

And that’s what I don’t like about this whole thing. They’ve already presented facts and contacted the relevant authorities, so anything further they say is conjecture and therefore YouTube drama. The first video by Mutahar was informative, the second was a bit of drama (they should’ve investigated the golf thing a bit more), the third was just dunking on him, and any further videos I see that aren’t directly related to an investigation are pure Internet drama at this point.

running a charity and saying that you’re donating money and then not donating that money is still charity fraud

Potentially. I’m not a tax expert, and I do know there’s usually some leeway about timing, though there’s a good chance delaying for 10 years does violate the law (not sure how the process of moving from private to public nonprofit changes things). This would hinge on how the IRS sees the “promises” Jirard made when asking for donations, whether the eventual donation fits with those promises, and how the IRS interprets the law.

There’s certainly enough to allege that they committed charity fraud, but there absolutely must be an official investigation before conclusions can be drawn. If you jump to conclusions, you can legitimately be sued for defamation and perhaps libel, depending on the statements.

the money from those events do not add up to the money they have on their non-profit statements

Again, that’s not proof, it’s evidence, and it certainly warrants closer inspection. We don’t know the deal between the groups involved, and we have no way of getting those without an investigation.

You can absolutely say, “this is really fishy, explain yourselves” and file reports to the relevant authorities (crowd-sourcing reports is a step too far since it just increases the crap authorities need to wade through).

He’s a scumbag, and a criminal, and a thief

There’s a good chance of that, but at the end of the day, he is innocent until proven guilty, and if you assume otherwise, you open yourself up to defamation lawsuits. That doesn’t matter on something like Lemmy, but it absolutely does for people use make their living off public statements.

He mentioned he knew the number hadn’t been donated as of 2021, so it’s entirely possible he wasn’t directly involved in the charity other than running donation drives. Yes he was an officer that whole time, but it’s very reasonable to say that a sibling was doing most of the charity work.

This doesn’t absolve him of responsibility (he’s an officer, so he should be aware), and he still didn’t donate it for two years. But it’s entirely possible he didn’t know it hadn’t been donated for 7-8 years, and after that point he just followed the same script he’d been using. Again, it doesn’t absolve him, but it does provide some important context.

Then again, this assumes what he said was true. I don’t have any reason to doubt it though, because he basically admitted to multiple allegations in the same call.

Perhaps, but we don’t know anything about those figures, so it’s going to need to be investigated by the IRS or state equivalent who can get that information. But at this point there’s merely a suggestion of fraud, no solid proof. They’ve said their piece, now it’s up to the authorities.

Yup. The series of events was roughly this:

1. YouTubers made videos alleging charity fraud
2. Open hand made a donation (a week or so after)
3. YouTubers made follow up videos about golf events not showing up in income
4. The Completionist posted response video, which didn’t mention the golf events (IIRC)
5. Follow up videos by YouTubers reacting to The Completionist’s response

That’s not what we’re talking about, pal. Re-read the post title and the question asked

I mean, the charity is getting audited for holding onto donations for 10 years. I think thats kinda a big deal regardless of if criminal charges happen

Looked up into it. It’s not just fans and it’s not just YouTube. They ran fundraising golf tournaments that they ended straight up not even reporting on their taxes (we’re talking well above 100k$ missing). It’s very shady.

Just because it’s about a YouTuber and was investigated by a youtuber doesn’t mean its youtube drama though. It isn’t just superficial drama about beef between two creators.

Charity scams that need to be audited for a potential decade of illicit behavior are not “youtube drama” just because a youtuber was involved

Also if your on the charity board etc you can use the funds for “marketing” or “admin fees”. Its a quite common scam that crappy charities only donate like 5% of donations

So, you’re kind of correct. However, you CAN make profit by acting as an ‘organizer’ for the charity event, where the charity pays you the money as a service, but directly gets the donations. See: Games Done Quick, which is a for-profit LLC that the various charities they ‘support’ pay them to put on the event. Of course, this number naturally is likely to end up being a % of the last event’s donations.

And fraud is not something youtubers is known for!

I’d rather just donate to the charity in question. Why funnel it through a middle man when I could just donate it straight to the source?

If they’re selling other merch and profits go to a charity, I evaluate it as a sale, not as a charity, and only buy if I want the item for that price.

People like to make the argument about the money going to admin costs instead of productive work, but I think that’s silly because that admin costs will need to be paid by someone. If I trust a charity to allocate bulk funds properly, I should also trust them to allocate other funds properly as well. Money is fungible, so all that earmarking does is make their accounting work harder.