Ireland has a tradition of non-digital doorstep donation collections for a wide range of charitable causes such as homeless services, refugee aid, animal welfare, cancer research and so on.

However, there are inevitably also imposters who fraudulently convince kind-hearted people into giving "donations". All charities in Ireland are required to register. But, as far as I am aware, there is no registration per campaign.

The student taking this project shall develop a mobile application which makes it easy to decide instantly between genuine collection and attempted fraud. The system will most likely require a classic server back-end built with a PHP framework or similar. Also, it might be a good idea if the verification process follows multiple strategies in parallel.

Apart from that, the student is free to create their own design. Here are some ideas:

• Verified campaigns. For example, the beneficiary applies electronically for a time-limited QR code which can be scanned and verified in real-time (at the doorstep). Care should be taken to make this fraud-proof, maybe in combination with photo ID.
• A self-updating AI based recommendation subsystem. A back-end process scans periodically significant sources like garda crime reports and news articles for negative indications and hospital news bulletins, animal shelter blogs etc for positive indications and uses the gathered data for training the recommendation system.
• An ad hoc system for discovering fake badges or campaign letters after a photo with the device camera is taken.
• Some feedback facility for trusted users which can be used to warn or reassure others about a particular person, badge etc.