Because billions of dollars are transacted through Benevity's platform, it becomes an attractive target for malicious actors seeking to exploit charitable giving. Recognizing risks is crucial to safeguard the platform's integrity and ensure that funds are utilized for their intended charitable purposes.
How Benevity protects client programs
With the scale of giving and engagement that takes place through our platform, it's essential to have strong deterrence, detection, and other safeguards in place to protect your program and the broader ecosystem of nonprofits, employees, and donors.
Benevity manages a transaction monitoring and fraud protection program. Here are some of the practices we have in place:
Weekly transaction monitoring
Benevity conducts weekly reviews of transactions, looking to detect patterns, trends, anomalies, and potential abuse. Transactions are categorized into risk tiers to help us prioritize responses and investigations efficiently.
Reporting processes for unusual or suspicious transactions
Benevity has multiple channels for reporting unusual or suspicious transactions. Clients and their employees can submit a report when they notice activity that deviates from normal behavior or appears suspicious. Each report is reviewed and assessed for risk, and if warranted, a formal investigation is initiated. This approach ensures that issues are addressed quickly, transparently, and in collaboration with our clients. Your vigilance plays a crucial role in maintaining program integrity.
Dedicated investigations
If suspicious activity is reported, we initiate an investigation. This can include:
- Reviewing donation and disbursement histories.
- Pausing disbursements.
- Enhanced screening of the nonprofit, including key personnel and open-source research
- Verifying supporting documents or websites.
- Coordinating with clients, legal teams, and—in rare cases—law enforcement.
Maintain watchlists and blocklists
We maintain internal lists of users or nonprofits associated with confirmed or suspected fraud and monitor for repeat patterns.
Reporting suspicious activity
If you or your users observe something suspicious, submit a report through the B-Hive Support Request form.
- Select Support Request at the top of this page.
- Select Benevity Compliance as the Issue Type.
- Under Benevity Compliance, select Suspicious Activity Report.
- Complete the form with as much detail as possible about the activity you are reporting.
Each report is reviewed and assessed for risk. If warranted, a formal investigation is initiated.
Fraud protection is a shared responsibility
It's important to note that no system can guarantee 100% fraud prevention. Fraud tactics are constantly evolving, and some bad actors may attempt to circumvent protections.
That's why we believe in a shared approach:
- Clients play a vital role by setting program rules, educating users, and reporting concerns with Benevity.
- Employees and donors are encouraged to report suspicious activity.
- Benevity monitors, investigates, and takes action to mitigate risk, while continuously improving our alerts, reporting, and protective measures.
What to expect if you submit a report
- Review: Our team reviews the report to determine if it meets the criteria for investigation.
- Investigation: If warranted, we open a case, gather evidence, and pause transactions if needed.
- Communication: We may contact you for more context or to provide findings and next steps.
- Resolution: Depending on the outcome, we may reverse transactions, deactivate nonprofits, or take other protective actions.
If you would like to learn more about our fraud response practices or have questions about an active case, submit a Suspicious Activity Report through Support Request, or contact your Benevity Client Success Manager.
Ongoing monitoring
The objective of transaction monitoring is to detect scenarios and conditions that may indicate program abuse, fraud, or unethical practices. Although Benevity has programs in place that attempt to prevent these from happening, clients are often in the best position to prevent program abuse, fraud, or unethical practices by their employees in their use of the program.
We strongly encourage clients to look for any anomalies that may be suggestive of program abuse, such as extremely high volunteer hours logged, excessively large donations, conflicts of interest (for example, an employee who is also operating a charity and donating to it through a client's program) or other behavior that can arise within client giving programs that takes advantage of clients and their matching programs.