The Charity Commission has removed ten charities from the register after finding they had made fraudulent applications.
In an operational compliance case report, published yesterday, the regulator said the evidence suggests that one person or a group were behind the fraudulent applications to gain charity status.
All the charities had similar aims to advance education by funding projects overseas and listed Bhutan and Bangladesh as areas they work in.
The Commission opened the case after pre-registration checks found that fraudulent documents had been included in 18 applications, which were denied.
A specific feature was found in the fraudulent documents, which the regular said it is not disclosing to protect the effectiveness of its pre-registration checks.
The Commission then checked previous applications to see whether they contained the same fraudulent feature, which was discovered in the documents of the 10 charities now removed from the register.
“The 10 applications had been submitted over a two year period but in looking at all of the information comparatively, we quickly identified a number of suspicious commonalities across all the documents," the Commission said.
In correspondence with each of the charities during the registration process they all supplied identical information about the intended public benefit of their work, which was one of the issues that raised alarm bells, the Commission said.
The regulator said it was working to identify those involved in setting up the charities and has informed Action Fraud about the case.
Two of the charities, Angel Network and Out Care, submitted returns declaring they were below the £25,000 threshold to provide full accounts.
The Commission said that as the initial documents the 10 charities provided were fraudulent and they had supplied none, or very limited, financial information, it was not clear how much money , if any, was raised by the charities or why they had been set up.
Silent Image, Ideal Ways, Link Effect, Capacity Building, Initiative Assurance, New Lead, Destiny Rescue and Guide Watch were the rest of the charities removed from the register.
