...In a letter to the leadership of ActBlue, these Democrats said they feared that “questionable” fundraising tactics by unscrupulous groups and operatives were damaging the party’s reputation and hindering its ability to keep voters engaged. The signatories, who say they have collectively raised or donated $1.14 billion on ActBlue since it launched in 2004, called for a number of new features and policies designed to protect donors from exploitation.
The most significant of those changes would involve ending notorious practices designed to deceive donors into believing that they are giving to official party entities, that they had limited time to donate, or that their donation would be matched by a major contribution from other donors. Such practices have become common among political action committees and even party entities in recent years.
But they became particularly prevalent over the summer as a number of so-called “scam PACs” attempted to take advantage of the groundswell of support for Kamala Harris after she emerged as a presidential candidate. Those groups had generic sounding names that left the impression they were sanctioned party committees. They also sent fundraising solicitations pledging anywhere between 400 percent and 700 percent matching donations—though such matches likely never occurred.
Leaders at those same groups would often take the money they raised through these solicitations and spend it on themselves, often by paying for the services of other groups they ran or controlled. Such self-dealing eventually led ActBlue to boot those scam PACs from its platform this past fall.
But in an effort to prevent copycats, the Democratic operatives, in their letter, offered a novel recommendation: that ActBlue “set a maximum threshold for the percentage of total expenditures entities using ActBlue for donation processing can spend with companies they own or control.”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/dems-urge-fundraising-gurus-to-put
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