Donors Say They Were Ghosted by a $10 Billion DAF

Georgia charity regulators have an “active and ongoing” investigation into the SDG Impact Fund, according to a spokesman for the state’s secretary of state. Three years ago, the donor-advised fund filed paperwork to the Internal Revenue Service stating it managed $10 billion in largely crypto assets, but the fund appears not to have filed mandatory federal reports since.

The spokesman from the Georgia secretary of state declined to give any detail or comment about the investigation into the donor-advised fund, which was created to help people steer cash and illiquid assets — including crypto currencies, art, and digital tokens — toward nonprofits achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

In 2020, the fund reported a steep growth in assets, going from less than $250 million to more than $10 billion the following year, largely based on noncash gifts. In 2022, when crypto assets plunged in value, the SDG Impact Fund’s fortune remained intact, and even grew slightly.

Meanwhile, the fund reported making a meager $8.5 million, or 0.1 percent of its assets, in gifts that year, indicating that money earmarked for charity sat in the fund’s accounts. Donor-advised fund payout rates, in aggregate historically, exceed 20 percent of assets, according to a study by the National Philanthropic Trust, which manages donor-advised funds and conducts an annual survey of the field.

Since it filed its 2022 990 form, the SDG Impact Fund appears not to have provided basic information about its financial position, governance, or grant making as required by the IRS.

This summer, the fund’s website briefly went dark and then re-emerged with a slightly different online address. Its chief executive, Anthony Suber, is the only member of leadership listed on the new site; four board members who were previously featured do not appear, including former chief development officer, Bryan Doreian, who was sentenced to one year in prison in December 2024 on charges of tax evasion related to crypto gains.

The SDG Impact Fund did not return several calls and emails for comment, nor did former board members Colborn Bell, Vincent Molinari, or Amber Nystrom respond to interview requests.

Meanwhile, about a half dozen donors, several of whom prefer to remain anonymous for fear of being sued, say the money they entrusted to the donor-advised fund has not been put to its intended use. In total, the fund managed 140 donor-advised fund accounts in 2022, according to its tax filing. The SDG Impact Fund, the donors claim, has refused to parcel out grants to their designated charities or give back their assets upon request.

But these donors find themselves in an odd position, philanthropically speaking, because when a donor opens a DAF account, the nonprofit that runs the fund legally controls the assets. Donor-advised funds normally distribute the money according to their donor’s wishes.

The SDG Impact Fund, the donors say, has not returned calls when asked to distribute grants to designated nonprofits and has told at least two donors that it is shutting down. In at least four cases, donors say they were asked to make a loan from their existing donor-advised fund account or to make a large minimum donation, with the promise of a hefty return within several months or a year, only to be ghosted by the charity. While the half dozen donors say the fund was generally slow in returning calls, its lack of communication became more of an issue at the beginning of the year.

One of those donors is Duraid Hallak, a San Diego entrepreneur who wanted to jumpstart his philanthropic giving after he made a profit on the sale of one of his businesses. He didn’t know exactly how he wanted to shape his donations so he opened an account at the SDG Impact Fund in December 2021 while he considered options.

Within months, leaders at the SDG Impact Fund came to Hallak with an unusual request: Would he loan them $250,000 from his SDG account, to be paid back with 12 percent interest in a year?

Hallak agreed to the deal, largely because he wanted to increase the amount of money he could eventually earmark for charity. But the repayment into his account hasn’t materialized in the nearly three years since, he said.

Hallak said he has been trying to get the money placed back in his account for nearly two years. The loss, he said, put his philanthropic plans to help people with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses on hold.

“Honestly, it’s gut-wrenching,” he said. “Those are the people that really needed this money.”

Notable IRS Filings and Donor Complaints

Before donors voiced concerns about the SDG Impact Fund, the DAF’s 2022 IRS filing raised concerns among nonprofit tax experts. The filing was not audited independently — a warning sign for such a large organization, the tax experts said — and there was little information about how the donations to the fund were being used.

The IRS automatically revokes an organization’s nonprofit status if it hasn’t filed an annual form for three consecutive years. If the SDG Impact Fund hasn’t filed for the past two years, as it appears, and fails to file for the current year, it would face an automatic revocation.

Brian Mittendorf, a tax accounting expert at the Ohio State University who, with Helen Flannery, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, researched the SDG Impact Fund’s filings, suggested that the fund’s failure to file for two consecutive years might warrant a closer look by the IRS.

“Failing to file a 990 can happen,” he said. “It just doesn’t happen with an organization with that large an asset base.”

In 2020, Jon Ruth, co-founder of Spark, a private company that invests in small-scale solar power operations, contacted the SDG Impact Fund because he knew several donors interested in supporting the company’s projects in Africa. Rather than invest in the company, they wanted to make donations and get a tax deduction, so Ruth opened an account at the SDG Impact Fund for their contributions.

Over the next three years, donors steered the equivalent of nearly $140,000 in current value of dollars and Ethereum, a cryptocurrency, to the newly created fund.

Around the beginning of the year, Ruth, who has advisory privileges on the account, requested SDG Impact direct a small amount — less than $10,000 — to a community center solar power project and for solar lanterns for women’s groups, both in Tanzania.

Suber did not respond for more than six weeks, and when he did, after Ruth repeatedly tried to contact him, SDG Impact did not make the grants for the Tanzanian projects, Ruth said.

Following up during the spring, his communication with the fund was sporadic, culminating in a message in June from Suber that the fund was sending notice to all its donors that it was dissolving, according to Ruth.

As complaints have piled up, donors have left the SDG Impact Fund, some for Legacy Global, a donor-advised fund sponsor in Mesa, Ariz., that manages about $250 million in assets. Since 2022, more than 30 SDG Impact Fund donors have opened accounts at Legacy Global and attempted to move assets there from SDG Impact Fund, with stories similar to Ruth and Hallak’s, according to Melodie Gatz, Legacy Global’s president.

Several donors, whom Gatz declined to identify, had been enticed into securing multimillion-dollar bank loans to make multimillion-dollar grants into the SDG Impact Fund, with the promise that they would see large returns directed back into their accounts, she said. Opening an account required a management fee of up to 5 percent initially but no annual fee.

Without an annual fee, Gatz noted, a donor-advised fund has little incentive to provide customer service to advisers who want to direct grants to charities.

“I don’t like using the word Ponzi scheme,” Gatz said, “but they were taking in money upfront and spending it without having the reserves to sustain the operational spend.”