Behind CNN’s investigation on deceptive political fundraising that costs elderly donors their retirement savings

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — A new CNN investigation documents how political campaigns have deceived the elderly and people with dementia with badgering, personalized text messages and prechecking boxes for recurring donations. The end result is that some people are misled, collectively losing millions of dollars. Unsuspecting family members are often caught completely by surprise.

Read the report, which illustrates the aggressive text messaging and charts how recurring donations can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars drained from retirement savings.

I talked by email to some of the CNN reporters involved in the project – Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Audrey Ash, Anna-Maja Rappard and Kyung Lah – about this eye-opening reporting.

How did this reporting come about?

WOLF: What was the genesis for this report? What set you out on the trail of recurring donations?

ELLIS AND HICKEN: We were poking around in the FEC’s database of contributions to political candidates and noticed numerous donors giving small amounts of money to various political groups, over and over again. We then looked at a sampling of who these donors were and discovered they were in their 80s and 90s.

Given the sheer number of donations and groups involved, we wondered if these donors knew just how much they were giving, and how often. We started calling some of the top donors and found out that they didn’t understand the scope or frequency of their contributions.

We also noticed a common thread: Nearly all had given through the same fundraising platforms: WinRed for Republican candidates and ActBlue for Democrats. We knew that The New York Times had reported back in 2021 how WinRed had used prechecked boxes that signed donors up for recurring donations, and we wanted to dig deeper into the people who were impacted. So we brought other members of the investigative team on board and launched the project.

When did you know you had something?

WOLF: What was the moment in the reporting when you realized you were onto something bigger than you might have anticipated?

ELLIS AND HICKEN: The very first person we reached was a man in his 80s who donated more than $400,000 to (former President Donald) Trump and other Republicans, and he seemed confused about the amount he had given when we asked about it. He’s the person highlighted at the top of our story.

We got hold of his son, and he said his dad had dementia and had no idea he had given away such a huge amount of money – and that he had drained his retirement savings to make those donations. He was one of the biggest grassroots donors to the Republican Party, so after hanging up, we had a feeling we were onto something.

What kind of time investment does this require?

WOLF: Start to finish, how long did this process take? And how many people did you cold-call for their story?

ABOU-GHAZALA: The reporting process for this story took over three months from start to finish. The team spent a significant chunk of that time gathering and reviewing the stories of elderly donors from a variety of sources: public records, complaints filed with government agencies, lawsuits and cold-calling donors.

Our team’s data whiz, Casey Tolan, downloaded enormous campaign finance datasets and helped us identify the biggest and most frequent donors through WinRed and ActBlue, and then we all reached out to over 300 of the country’s top elderly grassroots donors and their family members and managed to collect dozens of stories highlighting the widespread nature of the issue.

Why do campaigns use these tactics?

WOLF: Why do you think this particular sort of fundraising is so effective at convincing people to donate?

RAPPARD: Experts we spoke to told us that elderly donors are the backbone of grassroots fundraising efforts. This demographic, often less tech-savvy, is particularly vulnerable to highly personalized appeals for money, particularly when they play on their emotions.

In interviews with donors and their families, we found many elderly individuals experience loneliness and isolation, making them susceptible to messages such as, “Thank you, patriot!” that provide a sense of purpose or connection to something bigger than themselves.

Relentless text messages like “900 x match!” or “Win the Golden Eagles Award,” combined with confusing visual elements such as prechecked boxes for recurring donations, can easily mislead older Americans, especially those with cognitive challenges. One 81-year-old man we interviewed believed he was really communicating with Donald Trump and Don Jr. over text messages.

Which story sticks with you?

WOLF: Was there a particular call or family member’s account that drove this story home for you?

ABOU-GHAZALA: It became clear to us early in the process of reaching out to families that we were likely to be the ones informing them for the first time about the total amount their loved ones had donated. The conversations were unfortunately very similar – the families were in utter disbelief, often asking us for time to look into what was happening and assess the extent of the financial damage.

LAH: It took time to convince family members to talk to us on camera. A woman named Karen was stunned when we told her how much her recently deceased mother had donated to former President Trump and other Republican campaigns.

More than a month later, we spoke with her at length, where we talked about grief, financial strain (she struggled to pay for her mother’s funeral) and elder abuse. Sitting with her in her mother’s home, her heartbreaking loss hung over every part of the interview.

This wasn’t just about the money. This was a loss of dignity and a lifetime of saving money to care for the next generation. Her mother had done everything right and was taken advantage of. And it was legal.

How big is this problem?

WOLF: If families of victims didn’t want to use their names in our report, it’s probable there are people who don’t want to come forward at all, either out of embarrassment or simply to put something painful behind them. Is it your sense that a lot of this goes unreported?

ABOU-GHAZALA: We spoke to several elderly donors who didn’t believe that they could have unwittingly donated such a large amount of money to political groups or expressed a sense of embarrassment that they were unaware of the problem.

In one instance, an elderly donor asked us not to inform their family members about the donations out of fear they would be upset. In cases where we reached family members, the children of elderly donors experiencing cognitive decline often told us that their parents would brush off the notion they had unwittingly donated tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It’s likely that much of this goes unreported due to a complete lack of awareness that it’s happening in the first place, or the difficulty in having these sorts of difficult conversations with elderly loved ones about what happened.

An expert we spoke with also noted that ardent political supporters would typically be reticent to complain about their own political party, suggesting there are many other possible victims out there.

Is this predatory?

WOLF: Is there evidence this is predatory or is it simply a function of recurring payments, like when people realize they’re paying for more Netflix than they need?

ASH: There is evidence it’s a mixture of both – experts told us that recurring donations have a valid place in fundraising because it allows campaigns to plan for the future, giving them a base amount of money they can expect each month.

But both ActBlue and WinRed have features that go beyond just recurring donations – including prechecked boxes that sign donors up for these regular donations and “upsells” that collect additional donations from users. WinRed hosts a blog for campaigns that outlines features such as doubling or even tripling a donation with just the click of a box and pop-ups that encourage a user to donate before leaving the site. There are also mechanisms for campaigns to create individual-specific donation pages based on certain donor characteristics.

The way these donation pages are written also indicates that campaigns are relying on an emotional response from the donor. For example, campaigns sometimes create fake polls meant to create a fear response from the donor. The claims of “9,000 times matching” or telling a donor that time for their “membership” is running out is all meant to encourage donations from unsuspecting users, and a lot of the donation pages hosted on WinRed are confusing for even the average user.

And it is clear that campaigns and fundraising platforms know that donors get caught up in the system – both WinRed and ActBlue are currently being investigated by several state attorneys general, and WinRed even has a disclaimer on its website that if a campaign is suspected of abusing a certain type of “upsell,” like a recurring donation, the campaign will be blocked from using it in the future.

Is there a solution?

WOLF: Does there seem to be any movement to address this problem?

LAH: There has been previous legislation introduced to curb the use of prechecked boxes in campaign finance. Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Dick Durbin introduced legislation in 2021 following a recommendation from the Federal Election Commission that Congress ban the use of prechecked recurring donations, but that bill died in committee before ever reaching a vote.

Other groups that use similarly deceptive tactics have been investigated by the federal government, but political speech seems to fall into more of a gray area, so it’s up to Congress to take the next steps to regulate it. Critics say that the only people who can take action are the same people who are currently using the platform to raise money for their campaigns – even state attorneys general, who investigate consumer complaints, will use the platforms while campaigning.

Why are there more complaints against Republicans?

WOLF: Both Democratic and Republican campaigns currently precheck boxes for recurring donations online. What explains the fact that there are more complaints against Republicans?

ABOU-GHAZALA: From our review of political advertisements and solicitations from campaigns on both sides of the aisle, we found that the messaging coming from Republicans tends to be more aggressive and misleading. Still, some Democratic groups and campaigns also employ similar tactics.

Oftentimes, the language in the text message or email will feel very personal to the donor, as though the campaign or politician is interacting with them on an individual level.

For example, one of the Trump campaign’s ads appeared like a friend request with big, bold red text at the top of the WinRed page, telling donors they had “[1] NEW FRIEND REQUEST FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP.”

Other ads seemed to appeal to a sense of guilt or shame for the donor. An email from the Marjorie Taylor Greene campaign landed in inboxes with a subject line that asked the donor: “Have you abandoned me?”

The experts we spoke to explained how these kinds of tactics can suck elderly donors into their web, providing a feeling of belonging. It became clear to us throughout our reporting process the kind of effect these tactics were having on elderly donors.

Many families we spoke to reiterated the same point: Their elderly loved ones were often under the false impression that they were in personal communication with these campaigns or politicians.

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