I’ve been researching and promoting virtual volunteering since 1995. It’s a subject I feel passionately about. It’s real volunteering. I’ve seen how organizations all over the world, large and small, benefit from online volunteers, and I have accomplished a lot as an online volunteer myself.

So you can imagine how angry I got when I discovered this online volunteering scam back in January 2011: Community Service Help, Inc., which SELLS community service hours. This company charges a fee, and then gives a customer access to videos, which the person doesn’t ever have to actually watch; in return for saying he or she watched the videos, the company writes a letter for the courts, saying the person did community service.

I kept digging about this scam, writing about it again in July 2011, and again in November 2011. My blogging and research resulted in a nasty phone call to my home, as well as numerous comments on my blogs calling me the most vile names you can imagine. If you look in the comments of my blogs, you will also see posts by court representatives who have seen this scam, as well as the mother of someone that was ripped off, who is trying to get their money back.

I have written the Florida State Attorney General’s cyberfraud division, the Consumer Services Department of Miami-Dade County, numerous parole and probation associations, the Corporation for National Service and AL!VE to PLEASE investigate or, at least, take a stand regarding these scam companies – to date, they have done nothing.

Today, I got an email from a TV reporter in Atlanta, Georgia who used my blogs about this scam to create this excellent, DETAILED video about this scam and the people behind it. Thanks Atlanta Fox 5! Of course, after an NBC affiliate in Columbus, Atlanta did a similar, shorter story, the scam company put a tag on its web site noting as featured on NBC news!. So we can only imagine what the scam company will do with this Fox TV piece!

And as I’ve noted before: I’ve been lucky enough to have involved some court-ordered folks as online volunteers – I say “lucky enough” because they have all of them have ended up volunteering for more hours than they were required to do, and been really great volunteers. And, no, I did not charge them!

Also, here’s free information on Finding Online Volunteering / Virtual Volunteering & Home-Based Volunteering with legitimate organizations.

July 6, 2016 update: the web site of the company Community Service Help went away sometime in January 2016, and all posts to its Facebook page are now GONE. More info at this July 2016 blog: Selling community service leads to arrest, conviction

Also see:

What online community service is – and is not

Online volunteer scam goes global

Courts being fooled by online community service scams

My voluntourism-related & ethics-related blogs (and how I define scam)