A girl claps during a sing-along in a class at Monrovia Demonstration School in Monrovia, the capital, on the first day of the new academic year.

Protect yourself
from fraud

Home > Our supporter commitment > Are there fraud operations pretending to be “UNICEF”?

If you’ve received a letter, an email, a message via social media or a phone call,
• asking you to donate to UNICEF and providing a link to a payment portal or providing account details for a bank or crypto transfer

OR,

• stating that you have donated or set up a regular donation to UNICEF when you know you have not and providing a link for you to cancel your donation
and you have doubts about the communication’s legitimacy, please follow the steps below:

  • Delay responding to the suspicious communication and don’t engage with any links
  • Don’t provide any personal or financial information
  • If you have already provided financial information, contact your bank’s fraud department immediately and inform them.
  • Contact our Supporter Care Team on 0300 330 5580 (Mon-Fri, 8am-5pm) or email us and we will be able to tell you if a communication is legitimate.
  • Act upon the charity advice.

We encourage all supporters to be diligent, does the communication contain:

  • Grammatical mistakes or mis-spellings?
  • Is the use of colour, font, photos and wording used, consistent with the charity branding?
  • If links are provided to the charity’s website and policies – do these links work?
  • Is there anything different about the charity’s usual donation transaction process?
  • If it’s from a new charity or a third party collecting on behalf of a charity– do your research, are the details provided accurate (cause, address, website, links)?
  • Emails that include bank account and/or cryptocurrency wallet details for direct donations – exercise caution.
  • Emails that ask the recipient to email a separate email address to receive details of how to make a payment – exercise caution.

What are UNICEF UK doing as a charity to deal with incidences like this?

UNICEF UK takes these incidences very seriously. We have robust processes in place to deal with these attempts so that we can discourage repeat targeting by fraudsters. Upon notification, UNICEF UK’s Head of Fundraising Compliance, Legal and Governance Teams will prioritise the incident. We investigate and work with Action Fraud, the National Cyber Security Centre, the National Crime Agency, payment platforms, web hosting domains and email providers, to ensure these attempts are blocked at every possible stage.

To report a suspicious fundraising communication, please contact our Supporter Care Team on 0300 330 5580 (Mon-Fri, 8am-5pm) or email us.

Questions? Email our Supporter Care team

Email our team