> I'd rather they just told the truth. Lying for a good cause is still lying. I'm with you on that. As for the rest: Do you mean, if you as a donator have see

> I'd rather they just told the truth. Lying for a good cause is still lying. I'm with you on that. As for the rest: Do you mean, if you as a donator have seen through the lie, which should you donate to? Oh, I see, you're saying that liars might successfully get people to donate to them when otherwise they would have given the money to a more important cause. Yes, that's a problem. It's just that, well, people tend to think their cause is the most important in the world, and that siphoning money away from other causes for dishonest reasons is not a problem. [Well, for many causes you probably couldn't fool yourself into thinking that, but it seems distressingly common.] Charities who do this may be considered "selfish". It seems the irony doesn't always bother them. If we could tell those people "You idiots, you are hurting your cause by lying and I can prove it", then that would give them a selfish reason to stop, which seems it might work. Get them to stop, or if they don't, get the reasonable-minded others in their organization to kick them out or leave. It would be nice if they stopped for the right reasons, but if they did it for this reason, that'd still be an improvement.