'A complete rip-off'

Miami FL

Description

Campaign-finance experts puzzled and stunned by Trump camp's reported 'money-bomb' ploy...Older donors who gave a few hundred dollars to former President Donald Trump's reelection campaign said they were shocked to see thousands drained from their accounts. Refund requests jumped in the final months of the campaign. The ensuing surges in credit-card-fraud claims associated with Trump got on the radar of the US's biggest banks. The tactics included added pre-checked recurring-donation boxes at the bottom of fundraising emails and an opt-out, instead of opt-in, system for recurring donations. As time drew closer to the election, the recurring donations went from monthly to weekly. And the fine print by those bright-yellow donation boxes became smaller and more confusing, leading to donors, including many older ones, unknowingly signing up to give thousands in contributions. The Trump campaign's recurring-donation ploy both perplexed and shocked even the most seasoned campaign-finance professionals. A complete rip-off' of a plan Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21 who has been a leader in pivotal campaign-finance and ethics-reform battles in Congress and the courts over the past four decades, told Insider that he'd "never seen anything like this." "I've never seen anyone do what the Trump campaign just did," Wertheimer said, adding that the Trump campaign's behavior constituted elder abuse and was "below the bottom of the barrel" of acceptable fundraising tactics. "This is a complete rip-off. They knew exactly what they were doing," he added. "They knew they were tricking people into signing up for what they thought was one contribution, when they were really signing up for multiple contributions. Trump, of course called it all "fake news"...and continued to baselessly claim that the 2020 election was stolen.