Would you like to round up your transaction?

You pressed the green button. Your 40p went to charity.

Didn't it?

That question is where this book starts. It is nowhere near where it ends.

Because once you start following the money, you cannot stop. From the till it leads to the doorstep - where the young man in the charity tabard is legally forbidden from taking the tenner in your hand, because your whole first year of giving can be swallowed by the agency that recruited you. From there to the boardroom, where a chief executive can earn more than it costs to run the Salvation Army eighteen times over. To the charity shop, quietly exempt from the three costs that break every other business on the high street. To the reserves - tens of billions sitting in charity accounts, invested and growing, while the same charities post urgent appeals through your door.

And that is before the scandals.

A beloved national hero's foundation, fitted with a spa pool. A disaster charity's staff renting a guesthouse with donors' money and giving it a name unfit to print. A charity built entirely as a tax vehicle that passed on three pence in every hundred pounds - and stayed on the register for four years after the whole country knew. Aid money taxed at gunpoint. Executives who fail at one household-name charity and surface, months later, running the next. And £6.7 billion a year of your taxes, spent on charity in your name, audited barely at all.

Dean Thomson follows every pound of it - and names names. Not tabloid outrage: the receipts. Court judgments. Charity Commission inquiries. Filed accounts the charities hoped you'd never open. Every claim in the book traceable to a document you can check yourself.

Six million people in Britain have quietly stopped giving. This book is about the machine that broke their trust - the agencies, platforms, consultants and executives who learned to stand between a generous person and a good cause, and take a cut for standing there.

But it is not a book that will tell you to stop giving. It is the exact opposite.

Because running through every chapter is its answer: the self-audited giver - the person who does, in ten minutes, what no regulator can do at scale. Charity is one of the best things human beings do, and the cure for a leaking pipe was never to turn off the tap. It was to learn to see the leaks. The book ends by handing you the tools - two free websites, five red flags - to check any charity before you give it a single penny. And it ends, too, in the rain in Sheffield, with a man and a pram who proves the whole thing can still be done right.

Give. Please give.

But know where it goes.