Support The Seals.org Exposed As Fake Charity – Guardian Of Valor
We received a few emails about this charity which lead us to the story by SOFREP. SOFREP claims Graham Ware and his organization are not legit and has a lot of people wondering where the donated money has gone.
Here is a portion of the article written by the guys at SOFREP:
1. Ware claims that Support The Seals is a registered LLC in Arizona. (Source: the SupportTheSeals.org Twitter profile -@NavySEALsOrg)
FALSE. The State of Arizona shows a “pending” LLC application which basically just reserves the name until 1/20/13 (Source: Arizona Corporation Commission). The company itself doesn’t legally exist yet nor did it exist since Ware began his fundraising in 2009, which raises serious tax questions.
2. Ware claimed to be a non-profit organization in June, 2012 on his Facebook page “Navy SEAL Fund.org”.
FALSE. There’s no official business entity registered in Arizona called Navy SEAL Fund let alone one that’s a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation.
There is, however, an authentic 501(c)3 non-profit organization called Navy SEALs Fund which is owned and operated by a decorated retired Navy SEAL to help the families of SEALs who were killed in combat, or who were injured or permanently disabled in combat. Notice the similarity in names? The legitimate organization has an “s” after SEAL while the illegitimate one does not. This is known as typo-squatting or brand-jacking, and it’s a crime.
Typo-Squatting Navy SEAL Charities
In 2009, Ware’s group and the principals behind the Navy SEALS Fund cooperated on a fund raiser that raised over $26,000 to assist three Navy SEALs with their legal expenses in a criminal complaint that was later dismissed.
Shortly thereafter, in 2010, obviously inspired by what he’d been involved in, Ware decided to piggyback on the Navy SEALS Fund’s success by registering two very similar sounding domain names: NavySEALfund.org (notice there’s no “s” after SEAL) and NavySEALsFoundation.org. The former was purposefully created to sound like the group that he helped raise money with and the latter was created to sound like the granddaddy of Navy SEAL foundations: NavySEALfoundation.org (notice again that there’s no “s” after SEAL).
So Graham’s neat little trick of mimicking authentic Navy SEAL charities simply relied on the addition or deletion of one letter – s – as in “shitbird” or “suck-my-dick-you-valor-stealing-money-grubbing-motherfucker”.
From March until July 2012 both of those fake websites, when clicked, took visitors to Ware’s SupportTheSeals.org website with its PayPal donation button in clear view. Here’s a video which demonstrates that little trick.
This strategy takes advantage of innocent victims who believe that they’re typing in the correct URL for either the Navy SEALs Fund or the Navy SEAL Foundation but mis-type the ‘s”. Ware’s scam ended in July 2012 when the Navy SEALS Fund hired an attorney to demand that Ware release the domain names, which he eventually did.
However he’s still out there using the Trident in his logo, wearing it on his sweatshirt, and raising money for SEAL-related issues while keeping an unknown percentage for himself. And he still owns another domain name – NavySEALs.biz – which he has yet to do anything with.
Vision Strike Wear was also donating 30% of their sales to this organization, but once made aware of the allegations they immediately stopped the donations. They also asked Mr. Ware to discontinue using the logo which they designed for him back when they believed that he was a legitimate charity.
You can see the complete story, along with all documents, including a Cease and Desist letter signed by current and retired Navy SEAL’s requesting Mr. Ware discontinue his so-called charity.