PARIS — The law firm at the center of the Panama offshore accounts scandal routinely usurped the name of the Red Cross and other charities to help obscure the origin of millions of dollars in questionable funds, two newspapers involved in the investigation reported Sunday.

There is no suggestion that the charitable groups had any idea their name was being used in this way. International Committee of the Red Cross spokeswoman Claire Kaplun said Sunday that the revelation was ‘‘a total surprise and something we find extremely shocking.’’

France’s Le Monde and Switzerland’s Le Matin Dimanche said Mossack Fonseca created dummy foundations with high-minded names such as the ‘‘Faith Foundation’’ to hold shares in around 500 offshore companies.

The foundation’s beneficiary was routinely listed as ‘‘the Red Cross,’’ a designation which served the dual purposes of hiding the firms’ real beneficiaries and of draping them in an ‘‘NGO aura,’’ the papers wrote.