this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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YouTuber who ran a charity for something like 10 years, recently it came out that he kept all the money that was donated. What was supposed to happen is that he takes the donations, then donates that to another charity. When called out, his excuse was that he "forgot to donate the money."
He later did donate the money, but only after being publicly called out, and his excuse was that he was trying to find his right charity to donate to, not that he forgot.
He's still a scumbag, but don't oversell it, the truth is bad enough.
He starts by saying he didnt know and "that's not cool" but than changes his story and now it was totaly the plan all along. But on top of this, for years he would say all money they receive would be donated including things like twitch subscriptions and all that but now he says they used that money for their own costs. But wait there's more! His familly also runs a golf tournament which was supposed to donate all the money they recive to his charity but that money is nowhere to be found.
And to top it all off, he keeps bringing up his dead mother to try to get sympathy. The Completionist is a COMPLETE scumbag and a consistent liar, you cant trust a word he says. Oh and he is threatening to sue the people that brought his clear fraud to light.
I think that covers it
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.
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.
Over a decade he announced each year that the donations go to a specific charity and then he claimed that all this time he could not find a charity to donate to. That's different from ignorance.
He claimed he knew the money hadn't been donated in 2021, so if that's true, we're looking at 2 years, not 10. He was an officer the whole time, but it's very common for family run businesses and charities to name people as officers even when they don't have an active role.
My point is that it's very possible that he didn't know for the first 7-8 years, and later just followed the same script he'd been following. That's still bad, especially since he didn't get the money donated until called out, but not as bad as sitting on it for 10 years.
The golf thing is the final smoking gun, and I'd very much like to hear his explanation of that before jumping to conclusions. It could very well be that one of his siblings is doing something shady there and he wasn't involved. Until I have details, I'll keep my finger pointed at the charity itself and not Jirard, though he is a prime suspect. I think it should absolutely be investigated by the authorities, who'll have access to all of the account data and can provide proof of what happened.
He cannot claim and keep a straight face that he's looking for charities when he speaks about a specific charity for years, be it 10 or 2.
My point is that he could have just been evaluating charities for the past two years, and before that his siblings were supposed to take care of that. We don't know what the internal agreements were, or the communication between him and the rest of the people in the foundation. All we know is that he claims he knew the money wasn't donated in 2021, and that pushing on him last month got the money donated.
None of this is particularly relevant to those who have donated, but it's pretty important when looking at legal consequences and culpability. I think there's enough here to say Jirard is a scumbag, but not enough to necessarily claim that he is a criminal, though there's a good chance someone at the foundation has committed a crime.
Even if he only he knew in 2021 he then continued to claim the money was being donated as recent as 2022. Which means he is either complicit or lying.
I don't think you can draw either conclusion confidently. Here's an alternate explanation: his sister acknowledged that the money wasn't donated, and told him that it would once they pick a charity, and he didn't press on it until it got publicity. I haven't reviewed every time he boosted his charity, but in the ones I did see, he said he "worked with charities X, Y, and Z," not that they've actually donated money to them (i.e. they've been in talks about the donation process). I don't know how likely that is, but it's plausible enough for me to hold back on personal accusations, especially if I had a public platform like a popular YouTube channel (e.g. Mutahar @ someordinarygamers YT channel)
The way I see it, he's either complicit, lying, or negligent. I'm not going to guess which one until I see more evidence.
One, running a charity and saying that you're donating money and then not donating that money is still charity fraud, especially when you advertise that you've "donated the money" in past events.
Two, they run another golf event that has donations that are easily tracked (by the number of donation members and tier groups for those donations), but the money from those events do not add up to the money they have on their non-profit statements. They have also conveniently left out their donation amounts for that golf event in an (very poor) attempt to hide the money that they have been stealing from that event.
He's a scumbag, and a criminal, and a thief. And he and his brother deserves to serve prison time. And they did this in the dumbest way possible, to the point that a YouTuber could follow the path and find the fraud. This sort of case is a federal prosecutor's wet dream.
There is no such thing as "overselling" this.
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.
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).
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.
Yeah, so bonkers. Naming a specific charity for 10 years and then to claim that all that time was spent to find the right charity is such an obviously dumb lie. Before the golf tournament thing came out, he could just have claimed "Oops, I could have sworn I made a recurring donation and I just didn't look at the numbers all that time. Seems I made an error, my bad, sorry." and nobody could have disproven it having been a dumb human error.
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.
Well Mayne he didn't donate all the money because there are things lite donations, merch , bits and the golf tournament that weren't factored in by some ordinary gamer. So some money may still be gone
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.
So the money actually got to charities? Yeah he's scumbag, but not so much of one that shame didn't work on him, at least.
Yup. The series of events was roughly this:
It's worse than that.
They were using the charity as a way to hide money that they were actually stealing from another golf charity event. The math doesn't add up, and this is going to end with the IRS throwing these assholes in prison. Trey Parker already put out in a comment (on that same video above) that he's suing their organization, and this is going to attract a lot of federal govt attention. The IRS does not fuck around when it comes to charity fraud.
Wait... The Trey Parker? As in the South Park producer?
Left out the part and at the end he plays victim and made a claim that he was going to sue the people that called him out for not donating.