How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations

[Nevilledog]

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The New York Times
@nytimes
Exclusive: An investigation by The New York Times found that Trump supporters who thought they were donating just once were charged over and over by his campaign. Late last year, $64 million was refunded in contributions.

Recurring donations swelled former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign coffers in September and October, just as his operation’s finances were deteriorating.

How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations
Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions. Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald Trump’s struggling...
nytimes.com
9:51 AM · Apr 3, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.html

Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.

It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.

What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

“It felt,” Russell 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.

*snip*

[soothsayer]

1. Wow, what sleazy bastids

[SWBTATTReg]

2. I got a feeling that rump lost everyone of those who donated and then come to find out what rump

is really like...

Can't help but say that the writing was on the wall before they initialed donated, and in a way, these people who donated kind of deserved it, believing a POS like rump to begin with. Kind of serves them right...

[tanyev]

3. You may be giving them too much credit...

But for some Trump supporters like Ron Wilson, WinRed is a scam artist. Mr. Wilson, an 87-year-old retiree in Illinois, made a series of small contributions last fall that he thought would add up to about $200; by December, federal records show, WinRed and Mr. Trump’s committees had withdrawn more than 70 separate donations from Mr. Wilson worth roughly $2,300.

“Predatory!” Mr. Wilson said of WinRed. Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling The Times, “I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.”

[SWBTATTReg]

5. Perhaps. Morons like him need to lose their houses etc. before they finally ack the truth that

trump is a crook first way before he was a PINO...the trump brain displacement syndrome.

It's funny and ironic that crooks all seem to find each other too, to participate in each others' schemes to rip money off people. The classic sharing of 'marks' among each other so they all can steal a little bit each from each 'mark'.

[dalton99a]

4. "Battling cancer and living on less than $1,000 per month"

Trump's dead-enders

[captain queeg]

6. 100% loyal. There is no saving these people.

I’m not feeling sorry for them. Here’s a guy living on $1000 a month donating $500. Stupid from the get go. And then of course that was just the beginning.

[CousinIT]

7. Surprise! Trump scammed his donors.

He scammed everybody.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Suckers gonna suck. nt