How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations - The New ...

“It felt,” Russell Blatt 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. “Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. In the final 2 1/2 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. But the sum the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joe Biden’s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time. Overall, the Trump operation refunded 10.7% 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%, federal records show. 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 donation-processing sites ActBlue and WinRed, compiling a database of refunds issued by day. 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. 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. 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 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 Trump only after calling to have his balance read to him by phone. 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. (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 Trump’s refund rates were so high: His campaign accepted millions of dollars above the legal cap, a problem exacerbated by recurring donations. 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 Biden’s, the Trump situation stands out. “Predatory!” Wilson said of WinRed. Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Trump himself blameless, telling the Times, “I’m 100% loyal to Donald Trump.” All told, the Trump and party operation raised $1.2 billion on WinRed and refunded roughly 10% of it.