The Machine Behind the Lie

Kars-R-Us.com, Inc., operating out of Glendora, California, ran what it called a charitable vehicle donation program. On national TV networks including NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, Univision, Telemundo, UniMas, and Azteca America, the company placed ads in both English and Spanish urging Americans to donate their cars, trucks, boats, and RVs. The pitch was simple and devastating: your old junker could literally save a woman’s life.

The company was co-owned and run by Michael Irwin, the President, and Lisa Frank, the Vice-President, both 50-50 partners in the operation. Irwin drafted the advertising scripts, negotiated contracts with charities, and personally reviewed donor complaints. Frank oversaw the call center FAQs and participated in communications with charity executives about ad content. Together, they controlled every moving part of the machine.

The charity at the center of this scheme was the United Breast Cancer Foundation (UBCF), a New York-based organization that claimed to provide free and low-cost breast cancer screenings. Between 2017 and 2022, UBCF was Kars-R-Us’s most lucrative client, generating between 70% and 90% of the company’s total revenue every single year.

How the Money Actually Flowed

When a donor responded to an ad and handed over their vehicle, Kars-R-Us arranged pickup through a contracted transport company, sent the vehicle to an auto auction, and pocketed the proceeds. The company’s own website at donation2charity.com claimed that “75% to 80% of the gross from each auto donation goes to the charity.” That was a lie. According to the FTC complaint, Kars-R-Us actually retained 80 to 90% of gross proceeds for itself and its vendors, sending only 10 to 20% to the charity.

In some years, the charity’s cut was even smaller. In 2017, Kars-R-Us raised over $1.72 million (enough to pay the annual tuition for 47 nursing students) from UBCF donors and sent the charity only $182,255 (roughly the cost of three mid-range cars) — approximately 10% of everything raised. Donors had no idea. They thought they were funding mammograms. They were funding Irwin and Frank’s salaries.

The Ads That Lied to Your Face

Kars-R-Us drafted every word of every ad. The scripts were designed, the complaint states, “to tug at donors’ heartstrings and to maximize contributions with little regard for truthfulness or accuracy.” They ran on local radio in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, and Las Vegas. They ran on Univision and Telemundo in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Texas, New York, and Washington D.C. They ran on NBC television. They targeted Spanish-speaking communities with translated ads carrying the same fabricated promises.

One radio ad told listeners: “My mother is a breast cancer survivor and United Breast Cancer Foundation saved her life. Her free exam detected the cancer early and saved her life.” A TV ad told NBC viewers: “if you’ve got an unwanted car, you can donate it to the United Breast Cancer Foundation and help save a life through early breast cancer detection.” A Spanish-language ad aired on UniMas declared that “United Breast Cancer Foundation has saved hundreds of women’s lives through its free or low-cost breast cancer screenings.”

The ads even ran as text messages. Donors received texts claiming the organization “saves lives by offering free and low-cost breast cancer screening” and inviting them to donate their vehicle, truck, or van for a tax deduction. Every channel. Every format. The same lie, perfected and repeated.

The Charity Watchdogs Were Already Screaming

Kars-R-Us did not operate in an information vacuum. The FTC complaint documents that warning signs about UBCF were publicly available for years. As far back as 2013, the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting named UBCF one of the “50 worst charities in America” after a year-long investigation. That report found UBCF raised over $11.6 million (more than most Americans will earn in their entire working lives) over a decade, with $6.6 million (enough to fund healthcare for 440 low-income families for a year) going to professional fundraisers and only approximately 6.3% reaching direct aid.

The report was picked up by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Philanthropy Works, Non-Profit Quarterly, and national media outlets. In 2022, charity watchdog group Charity Watch gave UBCF an “F” grade, finding the organization spent only 7% of revenue on programs. In 2021, the FTC and multiple state Attorneys General had already sued a different fundraiser — Associated Community Services — for running the exact same scam on behalf of UBCF.

Kars-R-Us admitted they knew UBCF’s IRS Form 990 filings and audited financial statements were publicly available on UBCF’s own website. Irwin visited that website multiple times. The complaint confirms he never clicked on the financial documents. Choosing ignorance was a feature of the business model, not a bug.

The Numbers the IRS Had on File the Whole Time

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Was Really Stolen

Every single one of the 84,700 donors who gave their vehicle between 2017 and 2022 made a decision rooted in something real: the fear of breast cancer. One in eight women will be diagnosed with the disease in their lifetime. That is a statistic every American family has felt in some way — a mother, a sister, an aunt, a friend. Kars-R-Us knew that fear intimately. They studied it, bottled it, and broadcast it across every media platform they could access. The ads featured images of women receiving breast exams. They used real medical language. They manufactured a sense of urgency that was calculated and deliberate. These donors were not naïve; they were human beings responding to what looked and sounded like a genuine plea for help.

The betrayal is layered. Donors did not simply lose money. They lost the opportunity to do something good. Many of these 84,700 people may have believed for years that their old car paid for a mammogram that caught someone’s cancer early, that their inconvenience and generosity had a measurable impact in the real world. The FTC complaint is unambiguous: UBCF “can point to no individual whose life was saved as a result of donations.” The story the donors told themselves — the story that made the sacrifice of the vehicle feel worthwhile — was a fiction manufactured in a boardroom in Glendora, California. That is a particular kind of robbery. It doesn’t just take your property. It retroactively empties the meaning out of a generous act.

Spanish-speaking communities were specifically and deliberately targeted. The ads ran in Spanish on Univision, Telemundo, and UniMas across Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, New York, Texas, and Washington D.C. The translation was not incidental — it was strategic. Research consistently shows that Latino communities are underserved by healthcare systems and have deep cultural values around community support and family wellness. Kars-R-Us exploited both of those realities simultaneously. They took a language barrier and turned it into a targeting advantage, knowing that Spanish-speaking donors may have had even fewer resources to investigate the charity’s legitimacy before giving.

The women who needed those screenings and never got them also belong in this ledger. The FTC complaint establishes that between 2017 and 2022, a total of just $393,644 (roughly the price of a two-bedroom condo in a mid-tier American city, spent over six years) was directed toward actual breast screening services by an organization that raised $174.4 million (more than the GDP of some small nations) during that same period. The gap between what was promised and what was delivered represents missed diagnoses, delayed treatment, and the very real consequences of early detection programs that were never funded. Breast cancer survival rates are dramatically higher when caught early. Every dollar that went into Irwin and Frank’s pockets instead of a screening program represents a probability — not a certainty, but a real and calculable probability — that a woman somewhere did not get the scan she needed in time.

Legal Receipts: In Their Own Words

“In 2019, Defendant Irwin acknowledged to UBCF’s CEO that he just needed the ‘disease’ to make money, and UBCF was Defendants’ most lucrative client, bringing in as much as 70-90% of Defendants’ total revenue each year.”

— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 4

“Although UBCF expressly stated in the March 3, 2021 email referenced directly above that it could not support the claim, Defendant Irwin insisted on continuing to run ads that UBCF ‘saved someone’s life’ because those particular ads generated ‘well in excess of $100,000 every month.'”

— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 52

“According to UBCF’s CEO Mastroianni, Irwin expressed to her in late 2019 that ‘breast cancer is a dime a dozen and he doesn’t need [UBCF], he just needs the [breast cancer] disease to make money.'”

— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 56

“Defendants admitted to knowing that UBCF’s IRS Forms 990 and audited financial statements were publicly available and posted on UBCF’s website as well as on the IRS site. Despite visiting UBCF’s website several times, Defendants indicated that they did not click on or review UBCF’s IRS Forms 990 or any other financial forms that were posted on UBCF’s website.”

— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 40

“Defendants did not take steps to independently ascertain the truthfulness of the claims they drafted on behalf of UBCF, focusing instead on the substantial revenue generated by those claims.”

— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 50

“Between 2017 and 2022, UBCF’s filings to the IRS (Form 990s) indicate that UBCF raised approximately $174.4 million in total revenue. Of that total amount, it spent only $393,644 — less than 0.23% — on breast screening services.”

— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 36

The Damage Map: Who Else Got Hurt

Public Health: The Screenings That Never Happened

The source material makes one thing explicit: UBCF “can point to no individual whose life was saved as a result of donations.” That single sentence, buried in paragraph 3 of a 51-page federal complaint, contains the entire public health story. An organization that raised $174.4 million (more than the entire annual budget of many county health departments) over six years spent less than a quarter of one percent of that money on the breast cancer screenings it promised donors their money would fund.

In 2020, UBCF raised $15,288,108 (enough to pay for roughly 76,000 mammograms at average costs) and spent exactly $6,080 (the cost of a few mammograms) on breast screening that year. In 2022, the organization raised $57,017,907 (more than the annual payroll of a mid-sized hospital) and spent $70,029 (about 0.12% of revenue) on breast screening. These are not accounting discrepancies. These are policy decisions. Somewhere between a woman watching a Spanish-language TV ad and deciding to donate her truck to help “save thousands of lives,” and a UBCF executive signing off on a $6,080 screening budget for a full calendar year, something monstrous happened to public health priorities.

The complaint also documents that UBCF paid its CEO, Audrey Stephanie Mastroianni, salary and benefits “well in excess of what UBCF spent on its breast screening programs” in every single year from 2017 through 2022. The visual evidence in the complaint — a bar chart comparing CEO compensation to screening expenditure year by year — shows CEO compensation reaching as high as $600,000 (enough to fund roughly 3,000 mammograms) in some years, while screening budgets flatlined near zero. The people the charity existed to serve were an afterthought. The executive at the top was not.

Economic Inequality: Who Bears the Cost of Charitable Fraud

Charitable giving is one of the few mechanisms available to ordinary people who want to redistribute resources toward problems they cannot fix individually. When that mechanism is corrupted, the people harmed most severely are the ones who can least afford it: the donors who gave a vehicle they could have sold for cash, and the underserved communities that were promised healthcare access and received nothing. Vehicle donations are disproportionately made by working-class and middle-class Americans who own older, lower-value cars. The tax deduction benefit is modest. The act is primarily one of generosity, not financial strategy. Kars-R-Us targeted exactly those people.

The complaint documents that over 84,700 donors were deceived across the country, from Arkansas to Wisconsin, over a six-year period. These were not institutional donors. These were individual Americans who saw an ad on local TV or radio, felt moved, and acted. Irwin and Frank built a $4 million personal payout (enough to fund the college education of 100 students) on the accumulated generosity of tens of thousands of ordinary people. The wealth transfer here runs in one direction: from working Americans who wanted to do something meaningful, upward to two executives who found a way to monetize that impulse.

The FTC complaint also highlights the collateral economic damage to legitimate charities. Many real organizations with real breast cancer programs also accept vehicle donations. Every car that went to Kars-R-Us on behalf of UBCF was a car that did not go to a legitimate organization. The fraud didn’t just steal from donors; it starved the ecosystem of charitable giving that genuine nonprofits depend on. “Legitimate charitable vehicle donation programs lost out and donors lost the opportunity to support the many legitimate charitable organizations operating real charitable programs,” the complaint states in paragraph 64. The fraud had a multiplier effect: it enriched two people while simultaneously depriving dozens of real charities of resources they would have used to deliver actual services.

The Cost of a Life, Calculated

What Now: Names, Watchlists, and Resistance

The People Responsible

• Michael Irwin — Former President and 50% co-owner, Kars-R-Us.com, Inc. Personally profited over $2 million from the scheme. Drafted deceptive solicitation materials and insisted on running fabricated ads after the charity itself said they were false.
• Lisa Frank — Current President and sole owner, Kars-R-Us.com, Inc. Former Vice-President and 50% co-owner. Personally profited over $2 million. Oversaw call center operations and donor-facing FAQ scripts that misrepresented where money went.
• Audrey Stephanie Mastroianni — CEO of United Breast Cancer Foundation. Received salary and benefits exceeding what UBCF spent on breast screenings in every year of the scheme. The FTC complaint attributes the “breast cancer is a dime a dozen” quote directly to her account of Irwin’s words.

The FTC has a press release about this fake fundraising scam: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/09/ftc-19-states-act-stop-deceptive-cancer-charity-fundraising-scheme

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