This week on The Perfect Scamp.

There would just be piles of requests for money.

And any time someone called her and said,

you know, we have this great charity, they need your money.

So she would just read out her credit card and was giving away over $2,000 a month

that she could not afford.

Piles and piles and piles of junk mail jamming your mailbox asking for money.

If you've ever donated to a charity that solicited you via US mail,

you know what I'm talking about. Give to one organization and within weeks you start hearing

from dozens of them. Your personal information has been shared and sold. That's frustrating enough.

But once they get your contact information, some organizations are even more pushy. They start calling. They're exempt from

the Do Not Call list and as you'll hear from today's guests, some go way too far.

They claim you've pledged a donation when you haven't.

And some even intentionally mislead people experiencing cognitive decline

just to talk them into handing over a credit card number.

This mix of taking advantage of people in that tough situation, but also taking advantage of Americans and their

generosity, well, there are fewer things that make me angrier.

These bad actors hurt consumers and they hurt honest charities

doing good work too. But here at the perfect scam we want to help you spot people who

would do you harm and today's guest from Charity Watch has some really

great advice about how to avoid having your generosity taken advantage of. But first, we're

going to hear from a daughter, Kay Bransford, who spent about five years as a primary family caregiver for her parents before they passed away, and how she discovered their generosity was being exploited and how she came up with a system for helping others in that same situation.

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