ActBlue donations could be enormous online fundraising scandal

We have a fascinating issue developing with act blue. Act blue is the remarkably successful online fundraising system that the Democrats have been developing now for years. This year, it probably will raise a billion dollars off of credit cards. People get on it. They can pick the candidate they want to support. Sometimes they get on a recurring basis, you know, $20 a week or $50 a month. And it’s been very successful, except it now turns out that a part of act blue may be open to fraud on a pretty grand scale, of the billion dollars that has been raised so far on act blue in this election cycle, 400 million was raised without learning what the security code on the credit card was. Now, if you look at your credit card, you have that little security code. The reason that’s there is it’s proof that it’s really you, because people can lift the actual card number, but if they don’t have that security code, they can’t prove that it’s a valid card. Well, hack blue does not require the security code. Now, why does that matter? Because somebody can hack in, take your card. It’s basically identity theft in the classic sense. There is a Republican consultant in Wisconsin who suddenly discovered that his card had been used over 400 times to give money through act blue, even though he was a Republican and hadn’t given a penny through act blue. He then further found out that 35 of those donations went to Kamala Harris. He’s now filing a lawsuit under a Wisconsin racketeering act, because as far as he’s concerned, back blue became a vehicle for racketeering. Now I think this is the sort of thing you have to be very careful about. Identity theft is a huge problem, but identity theft if, for example, the Iranians were in the process of the way they would do it is they would buy a lot of gift cards, then they would turn the gift cards into a donation, and suddenly you can do it. The Federal Election Commission doesn’t require donations under $200 to be looked at. So you can give $50 at a time, and all of a sudden you could have given $5,000 but it was never in a single unit above $200 so you would not have appeared. And this has gotten serious enough that in well over a dozen states, the attorney generals are now actively investigating act blue, the US Congress, particularly the Committee on House administration, is now actively investigating and in fact, has sent a subpoena to the leadership of act blue, demanding that they come in and answer a series of questions, and the FBI is now engaged. This could be a gigantic scandal involving an enormous amount of fraudulent and potentially foreign contributions to the Harris campaign. It’s going to be fascinating to watch it play out.