When Obama ran in 2008 his website allowed credit card donations that did not check for address or zip code verification. If I recall didn’t even check the names. It permitted people to evade campaign finance laws as there were almost no safeguards to prevent someone from buying millions of dollars in prepaid cards and having them donated in $25 increments. Donations could probably be automated using software scripts. Just pick a name from a database, pick a credit card number from the database, use those to fill in the fields and submit.
This sounds similar. They call it smurfing (which is a drug trade slang as well), but generally it’s a straw donation but in this case there is no reimbursement the donors just steal your names (or in this case, no names used at all in many cases) and make the donation. The likelihood of being caught is low unless someone actually looks, starts calling the names (or reverse check of the cc number) asking if they made a donation. If the donation never appears on a person’s bank or cc statement, they would be none the wiser.
It is interesting that in this case there are no names associated with a lot of these donations. Obviously there is almost no oversight since it took a reporter, not a regulator, to discover it. But there will be an excuse such as “oh it’s a database reporting error” and perhaps some names will be backfilled.
I remember all those elderly people who found out they donated to Biden, Arizona’s Hobbs, and other democrats to the tune of a few bucks each transaction. Many times it was multiple transactions per day and the yearly total would be 15 to 20 thousand dollars. Of course, those people didn’t actually make those donations as they were on a fixed income and sometimes lived on that much or only a little more each year.
It was obvious it was a large and illegal donor whose donation had been broken into smaller amounts and those amounts attributed to other people.
ALSO-—OBAMA’S election:
REPORTS of campaign donations said :GA—and were taken to mean our state of Georgia.
WHEN the phone numbers were cross checked-—
THE “DONATIONS” CAME FROM GAZA-———
NOT just a single item, either.
Obama’s operation even allowed foreign credit card donations. It was a completely corrupt scheme that the FEC turned a very blind eye too.