Name:   GoneFishin - Subject:   Article Date:   4/5/2021 10:43:42 AM

Here is one of many articles describing the scam.

From NY Times 

Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions.

Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit

card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald

Trump’s struggling campaign afloat.

By Shane Goldmacher

April 3, 2021

Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush

Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s

campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in

everything he could: $500.

It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in

Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single

contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly

multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500

the next week and every week through mid-October, without his

knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and

frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his

brother, Russell, for help.

What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the

Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and

said they thought they were victims of fraud.

“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”

But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an

intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and

the for-profit company that processed its online donations,

WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the

Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up

recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week

until the election.

Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and

manually uncheck a box to opt out.

As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer

increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times

showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally

as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution.

Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital

letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.

The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists —

retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political

operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated

with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about

donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands

of dollars.

“Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who

made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via

WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost

$8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”

The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for

politics. In the final two and a half months of 2020, the Trump

campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared

accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to

online donors. All campaigns make refunds for various reasons,

including to people who give more than the legal limit. But the sum

the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s

campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made

37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time.

The recurring donations swelled Mr. Trump’s treasury in

September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He

was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the

election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to

In effect, the money that Mr. Trump eventually had to refund

amounted to an interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the

most important juncture of the 2020 race.

Marketers have long used ruses like prechecked boxes to steer

American consumers into unwanted purchases, like magazine

subscriptions. But consumer advocates said deploying the practice

on voters in the heat of a presidential campaign — at such volume

and with withdrawals every week — had much more serious

ramifications.

“It’s unfair, it’s unethical and it’s inappropriate,” said Ira Rheingold,

the executive director of the National Association of Consumer

Advocates.

Harry Brignull, a user-experience designer in London who coined

the term “dark patterns” for manipulative digital marketing

practices, said the Trump team’s techniques were a classic of the

“deceptive design” genre.

“It should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do,” he said.

Political strategists, digital operatives and campaign finance

experts said they could not recall ever seeing refunds at such a

scale. Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared accounts refunded

far more money to online donors in the last election cycle than

every federal Democratic candidate and committee in the country

combined.

Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it

raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on

ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing

platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.

How Refunds to Trump Donors Soared in 2020

Refunds are shown as the percentage of money received by each operation to date via

WinRed and ActBlue.

Note: Donations and refunds to former President Donald J. Trump include those made via WinRed

for the following organizations: Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., Trump Victory, Trump Make

America Great Again Committee, Save America, and the Republican National Committee. Donations

and refunds to President Biden include those made via ActBlue for the following groups: Biden for

President, Biden Victory Fund, Biden Action Fund, Biden Fight Fund, and the Democratic National

Committee. • Source: WinRed and ActBlue • By Eleanor Lutz and Rachel Shorey

Several bank representatives who fielded fraud claims directly

from consumers estimated that WinRed cases, at their peak,

represented as much as 1 to 3 percent of their workload. An

executive for one of the nation’s larger credit-card issuers

confirmed that WinRed at its height accounted for a similar

percentage of its formal disputes.

That figure may seem small at first glance, but financial experts

said it was a shockingly large percentage, considering that political

donations represent a tiny fraction of the overall United States

economy.

In its investigation, The Times reviewed filings with the Federal

Election Commission from the Trump and Biden campaigns and

their shared accounts with political parties, as well as the donationprocessing

sites ActBlue and WinRed, compiling a database of

refunds issued by day. The Times also interviewed two dozen

Trump donors who made recurring donations, as well as campaign

officials, campaign finance experts and consumer advocates.

Nearly a dozen bank and credit card officials from the nation’s

leading financial institutions spoke for this article on the condition

of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

A clear pattern emerged. Donors typically said they intended to

give once or twice and only later discovered on their bank

statements and credit card bills that they were donating over and

over again. Some, like Mr. Blatt, who died of cancer in February,

sought an injunction from their banks and credit cards. Others

pursued refunds directly from WinRed, which typically granted

them to avoid more costly formal disputes.

WinRed said that every donor receives at least one follow-up email

about pending repeat donations in advance and that the company

makes it “exceptionally easy,” with 24-hour customer service, for

people to request their money back. “WinRed wants donors to be

happy, and puts a premium on customer support,” said Gerrit

Lansing, WinRed’s president. “Donors are the lifeblood of G.O.P.

campaigns.” He noted that Democrats and ActBlue had also used

recurring programs.

Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, downplayed the rash of

fraud complaints and the $122.7 million in total refunds issued by

the Trump operation. He said internal records showed that 0.87

percent of its WinRed transactions had been subject to formal

credit card disputes. “The fact we had a dispute rate of less than 1

percent of total donations despite raising more grass-roots money

than any campaign in history is remarkable,” he said.

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That still amounts to about 200,000 disputed transactions that Mr.

Miller said added up to $19.7 million.

“Our campaign was built by the hardworking men and women of

America,” Mr. Miller said, “and cherishing their investments was

paramount to anything else we did.”

Asked if Mr. Trump had been aware of his operation’s use of

recurring payments, the campaign did not respond.

Mr. Trump’s hyperaggressive fund-raising practices did not stop

once he lost the election. His campaign continued the weekly

withdrawals through prechecked boxes all the way through Dec. 14

as he raised tens of millions of dollars for his new political action

committee, Save America.

In March, Mr. Trump urged his followers to send their money to

him — and not to the traditional party apparatus — making plain

that he intends to remain the gravitational center of Republican

fund-raising online.

A small yellow box and a flood of fraud complaints

The small and bright yellow box popped up on Mr. Trump’s digital

donation portal around March 2020. The text was boldface, simple

and straightforward: “Make this a monthly recurring donation.”

The box came prefilled with a check mark.

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Even that was more aggressive than what the Biden campaign

would do in 2020. Biden officials said they rarely used prechecked

boxes to automatically have donations recur monthly or weekly;

the exception was on landing pages where advertisements and

emails had explicitly asked supporters to become repeat donors.

But for Mr. Trump, the prechecked monthly box was just the

beginning.

By June, the campaign and the R.N.C. were experimenting with a

second prechecked box, to default donors into making an additional

contribution — called the money bomb. An early test arrived in the

run-up to Mr. Trump’s birthday, June 14. The results were

tantalizing: That date, a seemingly random Sunday, became the

biggest day for online donations in the campaign’s history.

Ronna McDaniel, the R.N.C. chairwoman, crowed to Fox News

about the achievement without mentioning how exactly the party

had pulled it off. “Republicans are thinking smarter digitally,” she

said, and were poised to “outwork, outdo, and outmaneuver the

Democrats at every turn.”

The two prechecked yellow boxes would be a fixture for the rest of

the campaign. And so would a much larger volume of refunds.

Until then, the Biden and Trump operations had nearly identical

refund rates on WinRed and ActBlue in 2020: 2.18 percent for Mr.

Trump and 2.17 percent for Mr. Biden.

But from the day after Mr. Trump’s birthday through the rest of the

year, Mr. Biden’s refund rate remained nearly flat, at 2.24 percent,

while Mr. Trump’s soared to 12.29 percent.

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In early September — just after learning that it had been outraised

by the Biden operation in August by more than $150 million — the

Trump campaign became even more aggressive.

It changed the language in the first yellow box to withdraw

recurring donations every week instead of every month. Suddenly,

some contributors were unwittingly making as many as half a

dozen donations in 30 days: the intended contribution, the “money

bomb” and four more weekly withdrawals.

“You don’t realize it until after everything is already in motion,”

said Bruce Turner, 72, of Gilbert, Ariz., whose wife’s $1,000 donation

in early October became $6,000 by Election Day. They were

refunded $5,000 the week after the election, records show.

Around the same time, officials who fielded fraud claims at bank

and credit card companies noticed a surge in complaints against

the Trump campaign and WinRed.

“It started to go absolutely wild,” said one fraud investigator with

Wells Fargo. “It just became a pattern,” said another at Capital

One. A consumer representative for USAA, which primarily serves

military families, recalled an older veteran who discovered

repeated WinRed charges from donating to Mr. Trump only after

calling to have his balance read to him by phone.

The unintended payments busted credit card limits. Some donors

canceled their cards to avoid recurring payments. Others paid

overdraft fees to their bank.

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All the banking officials said they recalled only a negligible number

of complaints against ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform,

although there are online review sites that feature heated

complaints about unwanted charges and customer service.

The Trump operation was not done modifying the yellow boxes.

Soon, the fact that donations would be withdrawn weekly was

taken out of boldface type, according to archived versions of the

president’s website, and moved beneath other bold text.

As the campaign’s financial problems became increasingly acute,

the yellow boxes became dizzyingly more complex.

By October there were sometimes nine lines of boldface text —

with ALL-CAPS words sprinkled in — before the disclosure that

there would be weekly withdrawals. As many as eight more lines of

boldface text came before the second additional donation

disclaimer.

Even political professionals fell prey to the boxes.

Jeff Kropf, the executive director of the Oregon Capitol Watch

Foundation, a conservative group, said he had been “very careful”

to uncheck recurring boxes — yet he missed the “money bomb”

and got a second charge anyway.

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2021

How Trump Steered Supporters Into

Unwitting Donations

1623

Recurring donations swelled former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign coffers in September and

October, just as his operation’s finances were deteriorating. Doug Mills/The New York Times

Russell Blatt’s brother, Stacy, who was a supporter of Mr. Trump, died of cancer in

February. Katie Currid for The New York Times

By September, the Trump Trump

operation began to have online

donations recur weekly by default.

10%

By June, the Trump operation

and the R.N.C. had added a

second pre-filled check box.

8 Around March 2020, the pre-filled

check box first appeared on Mr.

Trump’s online donation form.

6

4

Biden

2

0

Jan. 2020 Feb. March April May June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec.

Total online refunds in 2020, in millions

Trump $122

Biden $21

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“Until WinRed fixes their sneaky way of adding additional

contributions to credit cards like they did to me, I won’t use them

again,” he said.

Mr. Brignull, the user-experience designer who also serves as an

expert witness in legal cases involving misleading advertising,

noted that a Consumer Rights Directive in Europe prohibits

companies from deploying a defaulted opt-in tactic for recurring

payments.

“It is very easy for the eye to skip over,” he said. “The only really

meaningful information in that box is buried.”

The ‘Gary and Gerrit’ operation

By last summer, the Biden campaign had begun outraising Mr.

Trump’s team, and the president was hopping mad. For months,

years even, his advisers had been telling him how he had built a

one-of-a-kind financial juggernaut. So why, Mr. Trump demanded to

know, was he off the television airwaves just months before the

election in critical battleground states like Michigan?

“Where did all the money go?” he would lash out, according to two

senior advisers.

Inside the Trump re-election headquarters in Northern Virginia,

the pressure was building to wring ever more money out of his

supporters.

Perhaps nowhere was that pressure more acute than on Mr.

Trump’s expansive and lucrative digital operation. That was the

unquestioned domain of Gary Coby, a 30-something strategist

whose title — digital director — and microscopic public profile

belied his immense influence on the Trump operation, especially

online.

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A veteran of the R.N.C. and the 2016 race, Mr. Coby had the

confidence, trust and respect of Jared Kushner, the president’s sonin-

law, who unofficially oversaw the 2020 campaign, according to

people familiar with the campaign’s operations. Mr. Kushner and

the rest of the campaign leadership gave Mr. Coby, whose talents

are recognized across the Republican digital industry, wide latitude

to raise money however he saw fit.

That meant almost endless optimization and experimentation,

sometimes pushing the traditional boundaries. The Trump team

repeatedly used phantom donation matches and faux deadlines to

loosen donor wallets (“1000% offer: ACTIVATED…For the NEXT

HOUR”). Eventually it ratcheted up the volume of emails it sent

until it was barraging supporters with an average of 15 per day for

all of October and November 2020.

Mr. Coby, who declined an interview request for this article,

outlined his philosophical approach when offering advice to other

ambitious young strategists after he was named to the American

Association of Political Consultants’ “40 under 40” list in 2017:

“Asking for forgiveness is easier than permission.”

Mr. Coby’s partner in fund-raising was Mr. Lansing, the president

of WinRed, which had been created in 2019 as a centralized

platform for G.O.P. digital contributions after prominent

Republicans feared they were falling irreparably behind

Democrats and ActBlue.

The Trump and WinRed operations had been closely aligned since

the platform’s inception — Mr. Trump reportedly helped come up

with the firm’s name — and the president’s re-election operation

amounted to a majority of all of WinRed’s business last cycle, when

it processed more than $2 billion.

Inside the Trump orbit, “Gary and Gerrit” became something of a

shorthand term for Mr. Coby and Mr. Lansing, according to

multiple senior Trump campaign and White House officials.

The two strategists were already well acquainted: They had

worked together at the R.N.C. in 2016, when Mr. Lansing oversaw

its digital operations and Mr. Coby was the director of advertising.

And they were business partners in Opn Sesame, a text messaging

platform, which Mr. Lansing co-founded and served as chief

operating officer for; WinRed said he stepped away from its day-today

operations in early 2019.

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Top Trump officials said they did not know specifically who had

conceived of using the weekly recurring prechecked boxes — or

who had designed them in the increasingly complex blizzard of

text. But they said virtually all online fund-raising decisions were a

“Gary and Gerrit” production.

“The campaigns determine their own fund-raising strategies and

make their own decisions on how to use these tools,” Mr. Lansing

said in WinRed’s statement.

Unlike ActBlue, which is a nonprofit, WinRed is a for-profit

company. It makes its money by taking 30 cents of every donation,

plus 3.8 percent of the amount given. WinRed was paid more than

$118 million from federal committees the last election cycle; even

after paying credit card fees and expenses like payroll and rent, the

profits are believed to be significant.

WinRed even made money off donations that were refunded by

keeping the fees it charged on each transaction, a practice it said

was standard in the industry, citing PayPal; ActBlue said it does

not keep fees for refunded donations. WinRed’s cut of the Trump

operation’s refunds would amount to roughly $5 million before

expenses. (Archived versions of WinRed’s website show it added a

disclaimer saying it would keep its fees around when refunds

surged.)

There is another reason Mr. Trump’s refund rates were so high:

His campaign accepted millions of dollars above the legal cap, a

problem exacerbated by recurring donations. A pianist in New

York, for instance, contributed more than 100 times in the months

leading up to Election Day, going far past the legal limit of $2,800.

She was refunded $87,716.50 — three weeks after Election Day.

While every large-scale campaign winds up accepting and

returning some donations above the legal limit, including Mr.

Biden’s, the Trump situation stands out. Records show that Mr.

Biden’s campaign committee issued roughly $47,000 in refunds

larger than $5,000 after Election Day; Mr. Trump’s campaign

issued more than $7 million.

Trump officials attributed the excessive donations to enthusiastic

supporters and said the surge in postelection complaints was a

result of losing the election, not of the recurring donation tactics.

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The use of prechecked boxes is not unprecedented in politics, and

WinRed said it was simply adopting tactics that ActBlue put in

place years ago. ActBlue said in a statement that it had begun to

phase out prechecked recurring boxes “unless groups were

explicitly asking for recurring contributions.” Some prominent

Democratic groups, including both congressional campaign

committees, continue to precheck recurring boxes regardless of

that guidance. Still, Democratic refund rates were only a small

fraction of the Trump campaign’s last year.

Republicans widely hailed WinRed as one of the standout

successes of the 2020 cycle, and in a memo last October the

company declared itself the “trusted, recognizable platform” for

Republican giving. “Scam PACs, shady operators and outright

fraud is unfortunately a common occurrence in the online political

donation world — particularly on the right,” the memo stated.

“WinRed helps civilize the Wild West of the G.O.P. donation

ecosystem.”

But for some Trump supporters like Ron Wilson, WinRed is a scam

artist. Mr. Wilson, an 87-year-old retiree in Illinois, made a series of

small contributions last fall that he thought would add up to about

$200; by December, federal records show, WinRed and Mr. Trump’s

committees had withdrawn more than 70 separate donations from

Mr. Wilson worth roughly $2,300.

“Predatory!” Mr. Wilson said of WinRed. Like multiple other

donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless,

telling The Times, “I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.”

Trump was just the beginning

All told, the Trump and party operation raised $1.2 billion on

WinRed, and refunded roughly 10 percent of it.

Whatever blowback it received, WinRed was not deterred. Soon

after the November election ended, the two Republican Senate

incumbents in Georgia, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, deployed

prechecked weekly recurring boxes in advance of their January

runoffs.

Predictably, refund rates spiked.

Keith Millhouse, a transportation consultant in California, intended

to donate once to Mr. Perdue, with the aim of keeping Republicans

in control of the Senate. He wound up a recurring contributor and

called the practice “repugnant” and “deceptive.”

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“I’m busy like a lot of other people during this Covid era and I just

wanted to get in, make a donation, get done and move on to what I

needed to do next,” he said. “I thought I had done that. Then I find

out that, you know, I’m getting these other charges.”

He canceled the repeating charge when he saw the reminder email.

But by then WinRed had already processed his second $100

“bonus” contribution. He figured it was not worth the hassle to

protest. “Don’t try to sucker it out of me,” he said.

In the final 2020 reporting period, from Nov. 24 through the end of

the year, Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler refunded $4.8 million to

WinRed donors — more than triple the amount refunded by their

Democratic rivals via ActBlue, even though the Democrats had

raised far more money online. The refunds have stretched into 2021

and have been a source of frustration for the Loeffler campaign,

according to a person familiar with the matter.

Now WinRed is exporting the tools it pioneered during the Trump

re-election across the Republican Party, presaging a new normal

for G.O.P. campaigns.

Today, the websites of various Republican Party committees and

top congressional Republicans, including Representative Kevin

McCarthy, the House minority leader, and Senator Mitch

McConnell, the Senate minority leader, include prechecked yellow

boxes for multiple or recurring donations.

And after Mr. Trump’s first public speech of his post-presidency at

the end of February, his new political operation sent its first text

message to supporters since he left the White House. “Did you

miss me?” he asked.

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The message directed supporters to a WinRed donation page with

two prechecked yellow boxes. Mr. Trump raised $3 million that day,

according to an adviser, with more to come from the recurring

donations in the months ahead.

Rachel Shorey contributed reporting and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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Banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints last fall from the president’s

supporters about donations they had not intended to make. Doug Mills/The New York Times

Keith Millhouse wanted to make one donation to David Perdue, the Georgia Senate

candidate, but unwittingly made an extra donation. Jessica Pons for The New York Times

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