What this is, and what it isn't.
This site documents specific, sourced concerns about how a US-registered nonprofit is publicly representing its work, its technology, and its impact to donors.
What is Marici (sometimes searched as the “Marici Foundation”)?
Marici (marici.org) is a US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity registered under EIN 82-1536804, previously named “Take Her Back,” which describes itself as building “the world's first 'full-stack' AI nonprofit.” This site is an independent, claim-by-claim review of that organisation's public claims against its own IRS filings and archived web pages.
This site does not use “Marici Foundation” as the organisation's name: the records it cites give the name as Marici, previously Take Her Back. A name alone does not identify a registered charity, so confirm by EIN. See the FAQ answer on the name.
Key facts
- EIN 82-1536804; 501(c)(3) with an IRS ruling date of 1 September 2017 (ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer).
- Address of record: San Francisco, California, per its most recent IRS Form 990 of record (regulator briefing).
- Its first Form 990, for tax year 2017, was filed under the name “Take Her Back” (2017 Form 990).
- For 2024 it reported $4,147,171 of revenue and $5,478,264 of expenses (2024 Form 990).
This is not an allegation of fraud. Marici is a real, registered 501(c)(3) charity (EIN 82-1536804), tax-exempt since September 2017, with eight years of public IRS Form 990 filings, identifiable officers, and operational presence in Asia. The organization appears to be conducting genuine anti-trafficking work and has Silicon Valley supporters who speak publicly in its defense.
This is a request for substantiation. Marici's public-facing materials make a series of extraordinary, specific, and falsifiable claims — about artificial intelligence systems, about the scale of its operational impact, and about the relationship between donor dollars and the lives those dollars are said to save. Those claims appear without the public technical, methodological, or independent third-party documentation that ordinarily accompanies impact statements of this magnitude.
This site publishes Marici's claims, in their own words and verbatim from the sources they themselves chose, alongside what is and is not publicly verifiable. It exists because donors making decisions about where to direct charitable dollars deserve to make those decisions on the basis of evidence.
Pick your entry path.
The same record, organised three ways for the three kinds of reader who arrive at this site.
Start with the donor math.
The cost-per-life reconciliation, the donor-tier review, and the practical guide to evaluating any nonprofit's impact claims.
For Donors →Start with the AI claims.
The technical due-diligence review of the “50 AI tools,” “world's most sophisticated AI,” and “80%+ predictive mapping” claims, with a public-disclosure footprint comparison against Thorn, Polaris, and NCMEC.
AI Analysis →The raw evidence, in one place.
EIN, audited financials, claim summary, the unanswered open letter, complaint channels for the California Attorney General, the IRS-EO, and state AGs — with pre-drafted email bodies.
For Regulators →The numbers do not reconcile.
A central concern: the relationship between Marici's stated cost-per-life-saved and its publicly reported financial scale.
If Marici's claims are taken at face value, here is the arithmetic.
If Marici saves 39,000 lives at a total annual cost of $5.48 million, the true cost per life is approximately $140 — not $500.
Either: (a) the donor-page ratio overstates the cost per life by roughly 3.5×; (b) the impact figure is overstated; or (c) “saved” refers to something materially different from the rescue or intervention donors would reasonably understand. The three claims cannot all simultaneously be true as donors are likely to interpret them.
This is the central donor-transparency question. It is asked here without conclusion as to which of (a), (b), or (c) applies. Marici has not yet responded.
Recent updates to the review.
Every substantive change to this site is logged with a date. The most recent three entries appear below; the full audit history is on the sources page.
- update Structured-data and machine-readability pass. Per-claim and per-article pages now emit og:type=article with article:published_time / article:modified_time / article:author / article:section / article:tag meta; the publisher schema is upgraded to NewsMediaOrganization with diversity / ethics / corrections / actionable-feedback policies; per-claim pages gained FAQPage and SpeakableSpecification JSON-LD plus a Related coverage footer. llms.txt was refreshed to list every page and llms-full.txt now auto-regenerates at build time. Added a JSON Feed at /feed.json, humans.txt, /.well-known/security.txt, additional AI-crawler allowlist entries, and real per-claim sitemap lastmod dates.
- update Updated Claim 07 (the conflicting EIN) from 'corrected' to 'partial' after locating a Wayback Machine capture showing the discrepancy reappeared on a relaunched donate page.
- publication Published four new claims drawn from a June 2026 Wayback re-verification of marici.org, documenting figures that do not reconcile within Marici's own archived pages and filings.