Leading up to and after the 2020 election, the campaign of sociopath and con man Donald "Loser" Trump was on a feverish search for funding. The scam that they ran involved soliciting on-line contributions, but the twist was the gullible contributors signed up for continuing payments even though they intended a one time contribution. From the linked report:
"Trailing in the polls and facing a cash crunch last September, Mr. Trump’s political operation began opting online donors into automatic recurring contributions by prechecking a box on its digital donation forms to take a withdrawal every week. Donors would have to notice the box and uncheck it to opt out of the donation. A second prechecked box took out another donation, known as a “money bomb.”
The Trump team then obscured that fact by burying the fine print beneath multiple lines of bold and capitalized text, a New York Times investigation earlier this year found." (our emphasis)
When the contributors noticed that they were being charged each month, many demanded refunds to their credit cards:
"The maneuver spiked revenues in the short term — allowing Mr. Trump to spend money before the election — and then caused a cascade of fraud complaints to credit cards and demands for refunds from supporters. The refunded donations amounted to an unwitting interest-free loan from Mr. Trump’s supporters in the weeks when he most needed it.
New Federal Election Commission records from WinRed, the Republican donation-processing site, show the full scale of the financial impact. All told, more than $135 million was refunded to donors by Mr. Trump, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts in the 2020 cycle through June 2021 — including roughly $60 million after Election Day." (our emphasis)
This scam is different from the bait-and-switch tactics he's used frequently to raise funds for a stated purpose and then spending them on something else (or on nothing at all). In this "check the box" scam, he defrauded his gullible cult members through deception and borderline credit card fraud. Of course in this case as in previous ones, he'll claim it was his overzealous staff and that he wasn't involved in the strategy. It's always curious that con jobs always surround him, but he's never responsible.
