$45.5 Million Raised, $34.9 Million Kept: Inside the Cancer Charity Car-Donation Scheme

On 25 September 2025, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, alongside the Federal Trade Commission and regulators from 19 other states, announced a settlement with Kars-R-Us.com, Inc. and its operators, Michael Irwin and Lisa Frank, resolving allegations of a deceptive charity fundraising scheme built around donated vehicles.DOCUMENTED

According to the settling authorities, between 2017 and 2022 Kars raised more than $45.5 million — including roughly $16.7 million from California donors alone — soliciting vehicle donations nationwide on behalf of the United Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc. The pitch, delivered through national and local TV, radio, and online ads in English and Spanish, promised that donations would "save lives" by funding free and low-cost breast cancer screenings.DOCUMENTED

How the money moved

The regulators' framing is precise about where donor money did not go: the complaint alleges that of the $45.5 million raised, $34.9 million — roughly 77% — went to Kars itself, its operators, and its vendors, rather than to the cancer-screening programs the advertising promised. That ratio is the core of the case: not that no money reached the stated cause, but that the overwhelming majority did not.DOCUMENTED

Instead of using the funds to help those in need of breast cancer screenings, the scheme deliberately misled the public, exploited compassion, and diverted charitable donations to enrich its operators.

That description — attributed to Attorney General Bonta in the coalition's joint announcement — captures the pattern regulators say they see repeatedly in this space: a professional fundraising operator working on behalf of a charity, collecting valuable in-kind donations (vehicles, in this case), and retaining most of the resulting value as "administrative" and vendor costs.DOCUMENTED

A joint 20-jurisdiction action

What distinguishes this case procedurally is its scale: the FTC coordinated with California and eighteen additional states and agencies to file simultaneously, rather than one regulator acting alone. Multi-state charity fraud coalitions have become a more visible enforcement pattern — legal trackers monitoring nonprofit enforcement describe 2025 and 2026 as a period of increased state attorney general activity specifically targeting the misuse of charitable assets, citing separate cases involving falsified invoices, undisclosed insider self-dealing, and sham charities built around unrelated causes such as youth sports leagues.REVIEWED

Against that backdrop, Kars is not an isolated case but an illustration of a recurring failure mode: donors trust that a named charity beneficiary controls how funds are used, when in practice a professional fundraiser or intermediary organization may retain effective control over the bulk of what is raised.

What donors can check

Vehicle-donation and other in-kind charitable schemes are difficult for individual donors to audit in real time — the "percentage that reaches the cause" is rarely disclosed at the point of donation. Nonprofit accountability groups and several state charity regulators publish searchable databases of fundraising complaints and required financial disclosures; consulting those before a large in-kind donation is one of the few checks available to an individual donor before, rather than after, the fact.

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