5/15/2026 at 8:04:41 PM
I went back on Archive.org, and it does seem to be the case that they've been up front about their religious affiliation (online) at least since 2013, when I stopped looking.The pitch K4K has had for most of this time isn't about the good that they do so much as that they're very good at picking up your car conveniently and maximizing the IRS impact of the donation.
(Donating your car is probably not a good deal and you might be better off just having it bought and picked up by a salvager, and then taking the money and donating that.)
by tptacek
5/15/2026 at 8:28:46 PM
People donating things aren't generally looking for a good deal.I don't really care about the religious aspect, but if you're calling yourself kars4kids, the proceeds really should go to kids. In general, charities should have to be more up front about how their donations are being used. With rules being stricter as they get bigger. That is to say, the local fire department doesn't need to tell me how much of the hoagie sale is going to beer, but once you're buying commercials there should be some transparency.
As far as car donation options the purple heart is still around. I think at one point either the EFF or the FSF used to do it too, but I can't find it anywhere. Does anyone remember that?
by dec0dedab0de
5/15/2026 at 11:15:44 PM
> I don't really care about the religious aspectI certainly do!
I'm a paying supporter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, The Satanic Temple (it has nothing to do with satanism), and even the Friendly Atheist Podcast (which is just a podcast, unlike the first two). If I donated thinking I was helping families who couldn't get their kids to school or to after-school events and then found out that there was a religious org behind the commercials, I would be furious.
You can have and practice your religion. But bad actors have been using religion as an excuse for persecution and as a means of control in the USA for decades. I'm outraged to learn that they were manipulating people in this manner.
by alsetmusic
5/17/2026 at 3:55:00 AM
It’s a dead thread, but here’s Friendly Atheist talking about it:https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/california-judge-bans-kars...
by alsetmusic
5/15/2026 at 8:32:06 PM
It does go to kids, it's just a religious charity for kids. That's an extremely normal thing. I'm Catholic, we have them too. And they're not hiding it.I don't think it's a good donation! I wouldn't use it. Like I said, I'd junk the car and donate the proceeds.
by tptacek
5/15/2026 at 9:16:42 PM
Did you ever hear the jingle? [1]The main issue is that it's a bunch of kids (~5-8yo) singing "1-877 cars for kids, K-A-R-S Kars 4 Kids, 1-877-KARS-4-Kids, donate your car today". Given its resemblance to preschool-age kids songs, and that it was a bunch of very young kids singing it, and that it played incessantly over California radio stations, many people thought that it was a charity funding local underprivileged kids of preschool/school age, not gap years for 17-18 year old NYC and NJ residents in Israel. They were always up-front on the website about what it is (presumably how they avoid fraud charges), but how many people are going to check the website when they have the 877 number burned in their brain?
If you look at the lawsuits against them, they almost all fit that pattern: someone (often elderly) who heard the kids singing on the radio, had a junk car, and figured they'd go help some underprivileged kids. Sure, always read the fine print, but the judge listened to the jingle and agreed that it was pretty misleading. So did other judges in Pennsylvania and Oregon.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8UV7SAhvG4&list=RDK8UV7SAhv...
by nostrademons
5/16/2026 at 1:52:34 AM
> If you look at the lawsuits against them, they almost all fit that pattern: someone (often elderly) who heard the kids singing on the radio, had a junk car, and figured they'd go help some underprivileged kids.If they shifted their operations a bit, they probably could technically answer this criticism, even if in a way which wouldn't satisfy the critics.
Ultra-Orthodox communities such as Lakewood, NJ, contain lots of large families with many children, many of which formally fall beneath the poverty line – even though they generally have a lot of informal social support available to them which isn't reflected in the official poverty statistics. If they adjusted their focus to helping elementary school-aged ultra-Orthodox children from less well-off families, they could call that "helping underprivileged kids" – and a judge would probably agree with them - even if it isn't what many of the donors are thinking of when they hear the phrase "underprivileged kids"
by skissane
5/16/2026 at 5:56:30 AM
Laughing that you'd call a judge a critic. It wasn't criticism, it was a judgment!by freejazz
5/16/2026 at 7:20:28 AM
You are misinterpreting what I was saying. Critics and judges are two different groups.My point was, if they changed their operations a bit, judges would find it much harder to rule against – but that change wouldn't satisfy most of the critics.
by skissane
5/15/2026 at 9:25:31 PM
I think if you polled people donating, over 99.9% wouldn’t guess that it’s going to late-teens in a religious organization flying to Israel. I don’t even know that the 1/1000th person would guess.You can’t hear the ads + see the billboards, compare it to where the money was going, and say in good faith that people thought that.
by tyre
5/16/2026 at 3:27:23 AM
> It does go to kids, it's just a religious charity for kids.The article literally contradicts your statement.
> Instead, Kars4Kids primarily funds a New Jersey-based Jewish organization, Oorah, which provides programs, including an adult matchmaking service, trips to Israel for teens and summer camps in New York, the judge wrote. The only program in California that Kars4Kids sponsored was a promotional giveaway of Kars4Kids-branded backpacks, she found.
I have listened to those commercials on the radio for a decade and never in a million years would I have guessed that’s where the donations are going.
by tw04
5/15/2026 at 8:43:00 PM
Just from personal experience, Catholics are better at this. Other religions often consider religious instruction a charitable function. Catholics just help you, and you're moved into wanting religious instruction.When I would go to St. Vincent's as a homeless teenager, the only indication that I wasn't receiving services in some government office was the foot-high cross on the back wall. I don't remember a single mention of religion. Plenty of Protestant churches would make you sit through a service before feeding you.
edit: that's what I get for not reading the article before commenting. This is just fraudulent. It's a charity doing Zionist things for Jewish youth. Most non-Jewish people wouldn't donate to a kids' charity that wouldn't do a thing for their children if their children were needy. The only need it's attending to even in Jewish children is the "need" to love Israel and not enter into interfaith relationships.
by pessimizer
5/15/2026 at 9:17:06 PM
Are you saying that Catholic charities are more catholic in who they help?by aidenn0
5/15/2026 at 9:32:14 PM
Mostly. There are exceptions, like the Catholic adoption agencies wanting to discriminate against same sex couples in placements, but as far as using charity as a means to directly evangelize, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. A big part of that is also just a cultural aspect of Catholicism—we tend not to be big on the reaching out to people to join the church and there’s a tendency among Catholics to view themselves as members of an exclusive club rather than a party that there’s always room to bring in more people (the late Andrew Greeley commented on this in his book, The Catholic Myth and during a recent project that had me visiting a number of Chicago churches over the last year and as part of that viewing a lot of parish websites to check for Mass times, the numbers of parishes that had any indication on how to become Catholic at all was minimal (the vast majority assumed that you knew what RCIA/OCIA meant and I think I saw maybe a half dozen parishes that had the words “how to become Catholic” somewhere on their home page, all of which were predominantly Black parishes. On the other end of the spectrum, there were a handful of parishes where it was a challenge just to find an address and list of Mass times anywhere on them).by dhosek
5/15/2026 at 10:23:48 PM
> viewing a lot of parish websites to check for Mass timesHow was your luck with that? I often find the website is terribly out-of-date in general, and if the times have changed since the last update...
Sometimes the website links to recent bulletins, which are almost never wrong. If there isn't then I call the office to check; most parish offices have a list of Mass times in their voice-mail message.
by aidenn0
5/16/2026 at 4:45:50 PM
Generally good. The one case where it failed was for a Spanish Mass in a neighborhood targeted by ICE where the Mass began about half an hour after what the website said. Out of nearly 400 parishes in the archdiocese, only one parish¹ completely lacked a website and one’s online presence was a Facebook page which showed no updates for nearly two years. For added confusion, there is a pair of parishes which share a single website and the clergy preside at Masses at any of the three (formerly four) worship sites.³I was (the project concludes on Friday) visiting churches on their patronal feasts⁴ and whenever bulletins were available, I would check them to see if there was any deviation from their published schedule because of the patronal feast. Life frequently intervened to make me miss a number of Masses that I would otherwise have attended, not to mention that a number of parishes didn’t have any Mass at all on their patronal feasts, but it’s still ended up being a lot of church visits.
⸻
1. The Renew My Church reorganization of the diocese has resulted in the number of parishes being less than the number of actual churches with a significant number of parishes having two or more worship sites. Some parishes have a new name for the combined entity with the individual churches retaining their name (e.g., Queen of Apostles Parish has two churches: Queen of Angels and St Matthias) while others just name themselves with the two constituent churches (e.g., St Luke/St Bernardine).²
2. One such parish near me had a previously consolidated parish, St Catherine/St Lucy (which only had a single church after consolidation) and became St Catherine/St Lucy and St Giles) until operations costs led to the closing of the St Catherine/St Lucy church building (the school remains open) and while the parish retains the long name, I don’t think anyone other than official documents calls it anything other than St Giles.
3. That being the St Catherine/St Lucy and St Giles of the previous footnote and the other parish in Oak Park, Ascension and St Edmund.
4. https://www.dahosek.com/category/catholic-nerd-pilgrimage/
by dhosek
5/15/2026 at 9:51:37 PM
In the US, possibly yes. That’s not been their predilection elsewhere.by ofcrpls
5/15/2026 at 9:43:36 PM
That is not all this charity --- I'm sure it's not an especially efficient charity --- does.by tptacek
5/16/2026 at 12:35:51 AM
> It does go to kids, it's just a religious charity for kids.What do kids need with an adult dating service?
"Kars4Kids sends about $45 million a year, 60 percent of the money it raises, to Oorah, its sister organization"..."Oorah, which provides programs, including an adult matchmaking service"
by autoexec
5/16/2026 at 2:32:26 AM
Where do you think kids come from?by zeroonetwothree
5/15/2026 at 11:29:01 PM
> And they're not hiding it.If you went online. But people know of them from radio and TV which absolutely do hide it.
by FireBeyond
5/15/2026 at 11:05:31 PM
The vast minority goes to kids, by the sound of it: Ms. Landau testified that Kars4Kids sends about $45 million a year, 60 percent of the money it raises, to Oorah, its sister organization, which operates out of the same office building in Lakewood, the judge said. Another 30 percent is spent on in-house advertising, and about 6 percent on administrative costs. Oorah has also spent money overseas, the judge wrote, including $16.5 million to buy a building in Israel.by bigyabai
5/15/2026 at 10:34:34 PM
Tons of car donation options exist (I just linked https://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org/ways-to-give/donate-a-v... elsewhere) - but the big IRS loophole was closed (before the charity could just give you a bullshit receipt for the "value" of the car, anything remotely justifiable, now they have to either claim they put it into service of the charity, or give you the value of what they got for it and almost universally these cars go straight to auctions and fetch not much (and many are bought by junkyards).by bombcar
5/16/2026 at 2:51:35 PM
Wonder when the big flashy DOJ podium announcement about stopping this fraud of this religious based charity will be? Surely there will be massive news reports like the fraud of a daycare center in Minnesota, right? …Right??? Hey where did everyone go? What do you mean the DOJ isn’t even looking into this interstate fraud? Didn’t they just file charges against another charity for soliciting donations and then using the money differently? Weird.by therealpygon
5/15/2026 at 9:28:21 PM
>and it does seem to be the case that they've been up front about their religious affiliation (online) at least since 2013, when I stopped looking.If they were only soliciting funds on their website, which made it clear that your donation was being used to send 17 and 18 year olds to Israel, that would be a different story. In reality, the vast majority of their donations come in from people who are totally unaware because they hear the radio jingle, which is sung by little kids, and makes no mention of their religious affiliation or their affiliation with a foreign country. Here in New York I've been hearing these radio ads on a daily basis for literally decades and had no inkling about the true nature of this "charity" until today.
by StanislavPetrov
5/15/2026 at 11:35:38 PM
And courts in multiple states now have ruled that their advertising is fundamentally misleading, so this whole "well they've always been upfront" is clearly not undisputed.by FireBeyond
5/16/2026 at 4:32:50 AM
I disagree that even on their website they’re forthright about what they do with the money. Look at it.https://www.kars4kidsprograms.org/
=== We empower kids to be great. Kars4Kids provides the foundation kids need for successful, happy and meaningful lives.
…
We’re a national Jewish nonprofit providing mentorship, educational support and nurturing year-round environments together with our sister charity Oorah. Whether it’s tailored care from staff in summer camp, the safe haven of afterschool groups, or a mentor's listening ear, we provide the support youth need to thrive. ===
Sure, they use the word Jewish, but they carefully chose language that suggests a) the money goes to a wide range of underprivileged children, not just Jewish children and b) that their programs are traditional support programs, not trips to Israel.
by goldfishgold
5/15/2026 at 8:23:05 PM
That was back in the days when if you had mortgage interest, it was to your advantage to itemize deductions and include charitable donations. With the much higher standard deductions now, far fewer people file a Schedule A.by SoftTalker
5/15/2026 at 9:34:41 PM
There’s also the cap on the deductibility of local taxes. The Trump tax “cut” raised my tax rate by roughly 3% (although I’ve tended to have lots of fluctuations in my income and deductions over the last 15 years so it’s hard to make good comparisons from one year to the next).by dhosek