Priebus calls on Holder to investigate Obama campaign contributions

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Thursday demanding an investigation into online campaign contributions to the president's reelection campaign.

"[T]he President's campaign committee does not use the industry standard practices to guard against receiving fraudulent or excessive contributions via the internet," Priebus alleges in the letter. "As a result, the President's campaign committee is vulnerable to the receipt of prohibited contributions. Their failure to adhere to the industry standard has caused these questions regarding whether the campaign is deliberately inviting prohibited contributions."

The Priebus letter is based on a report the Obama campaign has previously dismissed as "entirely false," written by a group that the president's reelection team has called "another right-wing front group posing as an independent watchdog."

"OFA [Obama for America] does not accept donations from foreign nationals or any other ineligible individual—and the campaign voluntarily goes above and beyond Federal Election Commitments to ensure the integrity of fundraising efforts," the Obama campaign said in a statement.

Republicans have said that because the Obama campaign does not require donors to input a Card Verification Value — the three-digit number on the back of a credit card — there is a higher likelihood of fraudulent donations to the campaign.

And they have suggested that because a large number of users accessing the president's campaign website come from abroad, that some of those donations could come from foreign nationals — a violation of election law.

But the Obama campaign said in a statement earlier this week that the report cited by Priebus was the latest in a "pattern of peddling bogus news."

"The allegations made by Government Accountability Institute (GAI) are more reflective of the group’s politics than any grain of truth. GAI’s Chairman, Stephen Bannon, took over as executive chairman of Breitbart News and directed an anti-Obama movie released at the RNC by Citizens United," the Obama campaign said. "GAI President Peter Schweizer is a right-wing activist who advised Sarah Palin on foreign policy and worked as an editor for Breitbart News. The attorney hired by GAI to write their report, Ken Sukhia, shares an address with GAI, has “strong Republican ties,” and touts his work with Republicans on his own website."

The Obama campaign has also previously said that they regularly review their donor rolls and return donations that they suspect of being fraudulent. And the Obama campaign website explicitly states on the donation page that foreign nationals — along with feeder contractors, lobbyists, and minors, among others — are not permitted to donate to the campaign.

While the Romney campaign does require donors to input a CCV, more than one out of every 10 visitors to the Republican nominee's website also comes from "foreign sources."

Nevertheless, the letter from Priebus will likely elevate the issue. The RNC chairman tweeted about the letter Thursday morning, and the committee issued multiple press releases on his letter to Holder.

"This new report suggests that the President's campaign did not take the appropriate measures to correct for the vulnerabilities uncovered during the previous election cycle, in which reports surfaced that the president's campaign accepted a large number of excessive contributions and contributions from donors using fake names, suggesting a pattern of questionable behavior that is troubling," Priebus said.

Credit-card experts explain the extent of Obama’s deception

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/29/credit-card-experts-explain-the-extent-of-obamas-deception/

I have over 30 years of experience in investigating Credit Card Fraud and I can tell you, which you may or may not know, that the merchant acquirer that is conducting the collection of credit / debit card for the Obama campaign are responsible for the actions to be taken regarding the Address Verification System responses. The value of the AVS system is that the issuer of the card being used provides back to the merchant acquirer a response based upon the information provided during the authorization process. This response indicates to the merchant acquirer if the card information was validated as to ownership of the account. It is the merchant acquirer that determines what to do when the authorization response is received. In most cases the transaction that comes back with any negative meaning is denied. However, if the merchant acquirer has adjusted their system to accept any response as acceptable the transaction would be completed.

The value of the AVS system is to deny Card Not Present transactions (CNP) which are suspicious. This protects the merchant against charge backs for bad transactions. What is interesting to me is that the merchant acquirer has knowingly violated a basic CNP fraud prevention technique to accommodate a merchant (Obama Campaign). I think that both the Associations (VISA & MasterCard) would be highly interested in looking at the merchant acquirer that was processing these transactions. The value of ignoring the AVS responses is that multiple invalid transactions may be made without fear of being rejected by the authorization systems. This means that the real owner of the credit card account is willing to allow multiple transactions to be made on the account using different names and addresses that under normal conditions would be denied. The merchant acquirer has a complete listing of all transactions done and it would be very interesting to see how many transactions were conducted on the same account number using different names. I would think that this would be a Federal violation under the current campaign funding laws.

I found this article from the WaPo...here’s an excerpt, including a blatant lie from the Obama campaign (”we didn’t know you could check the name”.)

From the WaPo article:

The Obama team’s disclosures came in response to questions from The Washington Post about the case of Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, Mo., who turned up on Obama’s FEC reports as having donated $174,800 to the campaign. Contributors are limited to giving $2,300 for the general election.

Biskup, who had scores of Obama contributions attributed to her, said in an interview that she never donated to the candidate. “That’s an error,” she said. Moreover, she added, her credit card was never billed for the donations, meaning someone appropriated her name and made the contributions with another card.

When asked whether the campaign takes steps to verify whether a donor’s name matches the name on the credit card used to make a payment, Obama’s campaign replied in an e-mail: “Name-matching is not a standard check conducted or made available in the credit card processing industry. We believe Visa and MasterCard do not even have the ability to do this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/28/AR2008102803413_pf.html

this is all from 2008

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