Locks of Love, a charity that purports to provide hairpieces to children who have medical hair loss, scams donors by selling most donated hair for profit, resulting in over $8 million in revenue in 2023.
Locks of Love sells donated hair that’s unusable in its children’s hairpieces in order to offset manufacturing costs.
Contrary to the claim’s suggestions, Locks of Love is not a scam and it is highly rated by various credible charity accountability organizations. Tax filings indicate the charity has over $8 million in total assets — not revenue — which would include everything the nonprofit owns with any financial value, including property, inventory and investments. Filings show that the charity actually had more expenses than revenue in fiscal year 2025, the most recent tax year to date.
For decades, social media users have claimed that children’s hairpiece charity Locks of Love is a scam.
These claims have included rumors that the charity sells the vast majority of hair donated for profit, that most of the wigs it makes aren’t available to children with cancer and that children lucky enough to receive a hairpiece from Locks of Love are charged exorbitant prices.
We debunked these rumors in 2015 — but in 2026, conspiracy theories about Locks of Love circulated again, with TikTok users claiming that the charity “made over $8 million in revenue” despite donating very few hairpieces to kids (screenshotted, screenshotted).
We have rated this claim as mostly false.
It’s true that Locks of Love sells some of the hair it receives from donors. However, that doesn’t make the charity a “scam,” nor does that mean the charity is accumulating profit for its executives. Hair donation charities allow anyone to contribute not just with money, but with healthy hair. In Locks of Love’s case, hair donations are also turned into monetary support if the hair isn’t usable for a children’s hairpiece.
As we explained in 2015, the charity’s function is to provide hairpieces for children and young people aged 21 and under who are dealing with hair loss. If selling donated hair helps fund Locks of Love’s operations, then the charity’s stated function — acquiring and providing hairpieces to children — is still being served.
Meanwhile, the claim that the charity “made over $8 million” in “profit” originates from a misunderstanding of the nonprofit’s tax filings. Locks of Love has over $8 million in total assets, not revenue. That would include everything the nonprofit owns with any financial value, such as property, inventory and investments. (Nonprofits often invest to generate more funding and ensure financial stability.)
In an emailed statement, Madonna Coffman, founder of Locks of Love, said misconceptions about her charity have “unfortunately caused great harm to our organization for years.”
“Most importantly, families in need of help read these claims and decide not to reach out,” said Coffman. Coffman, who developed alopecia in her 20s, started the charity after her own daughter developed alopecia and lost her hair. Most of the charity’s beneficiaries are children with alopecia, although the charity says it serves children with hair loss due to any diagnosis, including cancer.
What Locks of Love does with donors’ hair
Locks of Love says it does not create “wigs” for children, but specialized hairpieces that are custom-fitted to each child’s head and require more effort and money to manufacture than an average wig. According to Coffman, they take up to four months to complete.
The hairpieces Locks of Love makes for children “can be worn while swimming, cannot be easily pulled off by a school bully or fall off accidentally,” nor do they require the use of adhesives like tape and glue to attach to the head, said Coffman.
Each hairpiece retails between $3,500 and $6,000, according to Locks of Love, and while the hair is donated, Locks of Love must pay for the manufacturing costs. That’s why the charity sells unusable donated hair.
“We are beyond thankful for every donation and ensure each donation has an impact,” Coffman said. “We hope to convert a heartfelt, nevertheless, unusable donation (too short or grey) into a monetary donation that supports our mission rather than discarding it.”
Locks of Love discloses in the FAQ on its website that the charity will sell donations of gray hair:
Yes, we can accept donations of gray hair. Because we only provide hairpieces to children, we cannot use this hair in a hairpiece but will sell it to offset our manufacturing costs.
The hair donation application form also notes that shorter hairs and gray hair will be sold to help with costs.
In 2015, we reported that families paid for prostheses on a sliding scale or received the hairpieces for free from Locks of Love. As of this writing, all hairpieces are free. Coffman said that at the start of the charity’s programming, the charity was focused on helping low-income families, and they didn’t have “the means to accept requests from applicants with high incomes.” Offering the option to donate and help offset costs allowed Locks of Love to consider requests from more financially secure applicants, per Coffman.
“The focus has always been on serving children and families affected by medical hair loss, and at no time was revenue or profit generated from any recipient,” Coffman wrote. “As our program has evolved, while we hope families with exorbitant incomes consider we are a charity, their financial situation is not a factor for consideration.”
Allegations about Locks of Love’s transparency
Locks of Love has been around since 1997, and there’s no evidence that the charity has ever been charged with or convicted of fraud, nor is there evidence that any credible investigative reporters have ever revealed significant issues with the organization, per a Google search.
In 2013, a group called “Nonprofit Investor” — which doesn’t appear to exist anymore — claimed that Locks of Love wasted or did not use an estimated $6 million worth of hair donations. However, that report failed to consider various factors, including the fact that the hairpieces are custom, meaning that the charity doesn’t just make hairpieces and store them somewhere until they’re needed. (According to Page 2 of the charity’s 2026 tax filings, Locks of Love provided “73 wigs/hairpieces” in fiscal year 2025).
In other words, the hair itself is simply stored until it can be used or sold to offset manufacturing costs. Furthermore, this calculation was based on a projection, not the actual cost of the hair, which has no clear monetary value because we don’t know how high-quality these donations are.
As we previously said, if the group truly trafficked heavily in black-market hair, significant discrepancies would arise in their accounting books. At the time, fraud investigator Gerard Zach told ABC News that the group’s IRS filing was “a bit messy,” but he doubted the organization had $6 million in unaccounted hair.
In contrast, Charity Navigator, a reputable nonprofit rating service, gave Locks of Love a 92% for overall credibility and 4/4 stars. The only metric Locks of Love failed was “Tax Form Disclosed on Website.” (It appears the Locks of Love website just isn’t up to date, as the 2022 tax filings are available on the charity’s page.)
Similarly, Locks of Love is accredited by the Better Business Bureau’s charity monitoring group and has the highest transparency rating given by Candid, formerly known as GuideStar.
What the tax filings show
Per ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, which pulls data directly from the IRS, Locks of Love had $8.54 million in total assets in 2025.
As we previously stated, assets are not the same as “profit,” contrary to the claim. In Locks of Love’s case, the majority of its assets — about $6.6 million — are investments in publicly traded securities (see Locks of Love’s 2025 tax filing, Part X, Page 11, under “Assets”). Most of the remaining assets are cited under “Land, buildings and equipment.”
Many nonprofits invest so they can operate the organization using investment returns, thus improving financial stability and reducing reliance on donations, which can be volatile.
Revenue listed on the Locks of Love 2025 tax filing under “Part 1, Summary,” indicated $197,055 in investment income, $257,679 in donations and grant funding, $25,872 in program service revenue and $6,447 in “other revenue.” (The nonprofit took in far more in investment funds the year before, amounting to over $1.2 million dollars.)
The nonprofit also had $730,000 in expenses in 2025, meaning it actually lost money that year.
No board member, including Coffman, received any compensation from Locks of Love in fiscal year 2025. The charity spent $256,248 on salaries and wages in total that year for four employees; the charity also had 128 volunteers.
Coffman also said no board members or employees at Locks of Love are associated with “any hair replacement company, hair products company, hair salon, hairdresser or any entity that may suggest a conflict of interest.”
