How to verify

1. Check where the money actually goes

The PayPal name or email, Monobank jar, or bank account should match the person or organisation fundraising. Be suspicious if the money goes somewhere unrelated, or if the destination changes between posts without explanation.

A personal account collecting for a unit's equipment is a problem, even when the person is real and the unit is real. Registered organisations move money with documented transfers and signed handover paperwork. A personal account has none of that, and nothing forces it to ever be explained.

Watch for the halfway version. An organisation exists, is named, looks legitimate, and donations still land in someone's personal account first, with no statement of what was transferred into the organisation's funds afterwards. That is the same problem wearing a suit.

Money raised for aid is not the fundraiser's to give away. If someone funded by donations then donates to a third party's collection as though it were their own money, and takes the credit for it, ask where that money came from. Buying goodwill with other people's donations is not generosity.

2. Check the price against what others pay

Compare the goal to what other volunteers are paying for the same thing: pickups, ATVs, drones, thermal optics, generators. Prices vary. They do not usually vary by double.

If someone is asking noticeably more than everyone else and explains it with vague talk of special models or special requirements, ask for a supplier quote. A real purchase has a real invoice behind it.

3. Ask how the person themselves is funded

This applies especially to foreign volunteers living in Ukraine full time. They need to eat, pay rent, fuel a vehicle and replace kit. Being supported to do that work is legitimate and nobody should pretend otherwise.

What is not legitimate is blurring the two. If someone runs a Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, Ko-fi or personal jar alongside their aid collections, donors are entitled to know which is which, to see them kept in separate accounts, and to have some idea of what personal support covers.

These platforms show supporter counts and earnings publicly by default. Hiding those figures is a deliberate setting, and asking why is fair.

This includes paid advocacy. People who host regular spaces, moderate communities, or promote one organisation constantly are sometimes paid to do it, and it is rarely disclosed. Being paid is not wrong. But an endorsement from somebody on the payroll is an advert, and it should be labelled as one. If someone's enthusiasm for a particular organisation is unusually constant, it is fair to ask whether they are compensated for it.

It is also reasonable to weigh the overhead. Money covering an intermediary's rent is money not buying equipment. That is not automatically wrong, since a full-time presence on the ground has real value. But it is a trade-off donors are entitled to know about and to decide on for themselves.

On this site, personal support links are marked with a "personal support, not aid" label wherever an entry declares them.

4. Reports are the only proof that counts

This is the single strongest signal. Honest volunteers publish evidence that money reached what it was raised for.

"The collection is closed" is not a report. It tells you the money stopped coming in. It tells you nothing about where it went. Neither is a thank-you post, a photo of the team, or a medal.

A slow fundraiser is not a red flag. Small accounts with little reach can take months to hit a goal, and that is completely normal. What matters is the ratio: how many collections have been announced as complete, and how many of those produced a report. Several closed collections and no reports is the problem. One open collection moving slowly is not.

Watch for the pattern where one goal closes and the next opens within days, over and over. Rolling collections keep attention moving forward so nobody goes back and audits the last one.

On this site, each organisation's past fundraisers and reports are listed on their entry where available.

5. Know what a real report looks like

A report answers three questions: what was bought, what it cost, and how you know it reached the stated recipient. It rests on documents that can be checked with someone else: invoices, bank transfer confirmations, handover acts, vehicle registration papers.

A live feed of incoming donations is not a report. A public page listing recent donations shows money arriving. It says nothing about money spent. A rolling window (the last 100 donations, say) makes it worse, because older collections scroll out of view and can never be audited at all. This is the most convincing-looking substitute for transparency in circulation, and it is not transparency.

Photos and video are welcome and are not sufficient. Destroyed vehicles, drone footage, soldiers in a treeline, a commander thanking donors on camera. All of it can be completely genuine and still tell you nothing about your money. The war is real and the need is real. That was never the question.

One honest exception. Operational security can require withholding the recipient, the location or the timing. It does not require withholding the cost, the date, or what kind of document exists. Where detail is held back, that should be said, not just silently omitted.

6. Missing reports do not automatically mean fraud

Plenty of honest volunteers have never published a report because nobody ever told them they should. Small accounts, people new to this, people who assume their word is enough among friends. That is a gap in practice, not evidence of theft, and treating it as evidence of theft does real damage to real people.

What matters is what happens after they are asked. Once someone is told publicly and politely that donors expect reporting, there is no excuse for not starting. Honest people say "fair point" and start. The refusal is the signal, not the gap.

7. Check official registration (NGOs)

Ukrainian registered nonprofits appear in the state registry. Every Ukrainian NGO in this directory links to its Opendatabot record; foreign organisations link to their home-country charity register. Check the organisation exists, is active, and the name matches who is asking for money.

Individual volunteers will not have this. That does not make them illegitimate, but it means reports and reputation matter even more.

8. Reach is not a donor base

A large follower count tells you how visible somebody is. It tells you nothing about whether money is arriving, or from how many people.

Plenty of honest small accounts are funded by a handful of loyal donors, sometimes almost entirely by one, and their goals move slowly as a result. That is not suspicious. Equally, a large, heavily boosted account with strong engagement is not evidence that a collection is well supported or well run.

Judge collections on reports, not on audience size. Both versions of that mistake do damage: dismissing small honest accounts, and trusting large ones on reputation alone.

9. Vouches, checkmarks and medals are not receipts

Being vouched for by a large, trusted account, or by a real NGO, is not verification. It usually means someone met them, likes them, or delivered alongside them once. It does not mean anybody has audited the money.

Organisations account for their own deliveries. They do not account for what an individual raised separately into a personal account. Those are two different money trails and they get confused constantly, including by the organisations themselves.

Check the voucher's own record. A vouch is worth what the person giving it has staked on being right. Some people vouch for anyone who asks and have been burned repeatedly, usually through carelessness rather than complicity. The effect on your money is the same either way. Someone who vouches selectively, and who has publicly withdrawn a vouch when they got it wrong, is telling you something. Someone who vouches for everybody is telling you something else.

The blue checkmark on X is a paid subscription. It verifies a payment method, nothing else.

Medals and state awards are not verification either. Ukraine awards volunteers and fundraisers often, and most recipients have earned it. But an award records that somebody was nominated and approved at one point in time. It is not an audit, it does not follow what happened afterwards, and people holding genuine awards have gone on to be credibly accused of fabricating their reports or their service. The same goes for press coverage and endorsements.

A public statement by an organisation does not expire. If a named organisation has published a documented complaint about someone and never retracted it, "that was years ago, everyone has moved on" is not an answer. Either it was addressed at the time with evidence, or it still stands.

10. Use X's "About this account" panel

On any X profile, tap the join date to open About this account. It shows when the account was created, how many times it has changed username, which country's app store the app was downloaded from, and the country or region the account is based in.

Red flags: a "Kharkiv volunteer" whose account is based in, or was created via an app store in, a country with no plausible connection to them; an account created last month; a long history of username changes (recycled follower-farming accounts).

Caveats: treat this as a signal, not proof. The data can be skewed by VPNs, travel or temporary relocation, and X itself warns it may be inaccurate. Plenty of genuine Ukrainian volunteers are refugees posting from Germany, Poland or the UK. A mismatch is a reason to look closer, not an automatic verdict; and a "clean" result is not a guarantee either.

11. Check the images and the story elsewhere

Reverse-image search. Grifters steal photos of real deliveries, real soldiers and real volunteers. Run profile pictures and "proof" photos through Google Lens or TinEye. Stolen images turning up on older, unrelated accounts is a hard red flag.

Check the other accounts. Campaigns that exist only on the platform where the money comes in, and are invisible on the same person's other public accounts, are worth asking about. So is a large, visible gap between the hardship described to donors and what is publicly on display in the same period.

Check the unit still matches. People transfer between units. Someone raising money in a brigade's name after leaving it is a question worth asking out loud.

Keep this proportionate. You are checking whether public claims are consistent with each other. You are not investigating someone's family.

12. Watch what happens when someone asks a question

This is the check most people skip, and it is the most revealing one.

Honest volunteers answer. They may be tired, blunt or slow, but they answer, because their ability to keep working depends on their reputation. Grifters block, delete posts, redirect to their health or service record, or let supporters do the work for them.

If publicly asking "can you show receipts for the last collection?" produces a pile-on, accusations of being a russian bot, threats to report you to security services, or fresh anonymous accounts appearing to harass you, that is information about the fundraiser. It is not information about you.

Manufactured urgency, DM-only payment details, and fundraising only in the replies under viral posts belong in the same category.

13. Ask people who donated before you

Donation-tier rewards are common: patches, flags, signed notes, unit awards for larger amounts. Ask in public whether earlier donors actually received what was promised, and whether anyone got a thank-you, a report, or a reply at all.

Promised rewards that never arrive are a cheap, early, checkable signal, and one that costs a donor nothing to answer.

14. Notice who gets the credit, and whose work it is

A soft signal, not a red flag. Some people are naturally self-promoting and completely honest, and some are quiet and completely dishonest. Weigh this one lightly.

That said: aid bought with donated money was bought by the donors. Reports that consistently frame it as the organiser's personal generosity, or that thank prominent supporters at length while never thanking the people who actually paid, are worth noticing. So is attaching yourself prominently to somebody else's investigation or somebody else's case.

The serious version of this is appropriation. Someone volunteers with an established organisation, then launches a similarly named page with their own payment account, uses that organisation's photos and videos to raise into it, and donors cannot tell the two apart. If two entities have confusingly similar names, find out which one your money reaches, and whether the original organisation agreed to any of it.