It's mostly WinRed but there's some ActBlue too

October 22, 2024 6:51 AM

How elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns (slCNN, warning: it is an interactive article)
posted by Kitteh (29 comments total)

Political spam isn't covered by the CAN SPAM act. I desperately wish it was, and that there was a "do not spam" list which had serious fines associated with it.
posted by constraint at 6:54 AM on October 22 [15 favorites]

Some serious both-siderism going on in that headline, considering the article says complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about Republicans outnumber those about Democrats by a 7-1 ratio.
posted by TedW at 6:56 AM on October 22 [29 favorites]

Listen, my mom has Alzheimer's and is a Democrat. She's terrified of Trump getting a second kick at the can. If she received Democrat spam playing on this fear, she would absolutely give them money. We already had to bail her out of one really shitty elder abuse money scam not even two years ago, so no, it's not just Republicans.

Dementia/Alzheimer's patients, no matter their political stripe, are incredibly vulnerable. Especially if they have no family and are lonely.
posted by Kitteh at 7:13 AM on October 22 [18 favorites]

Sharing this in case it helps any caregivers: I think I found a way to start chipping away at the number of "donate now please" texts. I noticed that whenever I replied to a text with "Stop", I would get a confirmation from a different number entirely. I had a weird hunch that that different number would be the next one to spam me.

So now what I do is that after I text "stop" to end, I block that number - AND I block the number from the "confirming you're unsubscribed" text. That's actually started to make a tiny dent in my onslaught.

Maybe something for caregivers to try if you're looking after someone who's similarly getting a flood of texts.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:25 AM on October 22 [26 favorites]

This is some truly despicable shit.
posted by senor biggles at 7:30 AM on October 22 [2 favorites]

From what I've seen, the language Republican stuff might be a little bit more shameless (or maybe I only see the most shameless ones), but ActBlue (and Action Network, and others) are equally guilty of having adopted the worst things about the direct-mail industry to the new world of spam emails and text messages.

Make a single donation? You might've unwillingly signed up for a recurring one. There's a good chance that campaign is going to share your contact information with anyone that asks.

Misleading, hyperbolic language and trading on parasocial relationships are both very effective tactics, so campaigns lean into them.

"Hey, box, it's your old pal Barack. If Jimmy Withers isn't elected dogcatcher, Mitch McConnell and Marjorie Taylor Greene will have you and your family murdered. Luckily, we have a 1000% matching donation, but it's only for the next fifteen minutes. The suggested donation is $700. Can you help me out?"

We need a new Voting Rights Act, and putting some limits on this kind of predatory marketing needs to be part of it.
posted by box at 7:32 AM on October 22 [21 favorites]

But how else am I going to know if I've been named a MAGA Living Legend or not?????
posted by fortitude25 at 8:22 AM on October 22 [3 favorites]

Political spam isn't covered by the CAN SPAM act. I desperately wish it was,

You are asking the government to regulate which political speech you are able to interact with.

Do you think a second Trump Administration is going to allow Dem politicians to email you or anyone else?
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 8:50 AM on October 22 [2 favorites]

My Mom, not with dementia, was hit by ActBlue with a recurring donation that took me ages to get resolved. It's all people who donate and don't opt out of the recurring donations. It's a despicable practice and I don't really care if it's overwhelmingly Republican grifters, it shouldn't happen to anyone.
posted by drossdragon at 9:26 AM on October 22 [9 favorites]

You are asking the government to regulate which political speech you are able to interact with.

What is the CAN-SPAM act? Among other things, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 prohibits the inclusion of deceptive or misleading information and subject headings, requires identifying information such as a return address in email messages, and prohibits sending emails to a recipient after an explicit response that the recipient does not want to continue receiving messages

I'm not sure what part of "stop fucking blowing my phone up already" is so controversial here. I don't care what political party you represent or what the political situation is, people have the right to be left alone. The GOP might be doing the bigger party at fault but the Democrats are definitely to blame as well, based on dealing with my own left-leaning elderly father's affairs. Not really surprised anymore so many people either rally for a third party or refuse to engage with US politics.
posted by photo guy at 9:58 AM on October 22 [11 favorites]

> recurring donation that took me ages to get resolved

By "resolved," do you mean clawing back money, or just cancelling the recurrence? I (intentionally) signed up for a recurring donation on ActBlue this season. It seemed quite clear what I was doing, and cancelling appears to involve logging in and clicking a button. I'm curious as to what problems you experienced.
posted by Turd Ferguson at 10:11 AM on October 22

Victimization of the elderly and those with cognitive disabilities is one of the major tragedies of our time. Unfortunately we lack state capacity and social trust required to deal with it so it's on people's relatives to help them.
posted by hermanubis at 10:17 AM on October 22 [6 favorites]

Thankfully I get surprisingly little phone/SMS spam, but that's because I use my google voice number for basically everything to act as a buffer to my real number.

But I can't even count the number of Trump/GOP email spam addresses I've blocked.

I did get a GOP mailer that has the usual dumb tricks that they typically use to target the elderly, like a laughably fake handwritten font for the address field to make it look more personal or friendly and all of that nonsense, and I'm in a super blue area where they have about a snowflake's chance in hell of actually winning anything.

And suspiciously I think the stamp on this postcard isn't actually canceled and there do not appear to be even any UV ink postmarks or cancel marks, which makes me wonder if someone was actually driving around and stuffing them into mailboxes which as far as I know is some kind of a federal mail fraud crime to put anything in a USPS mailbox that wasn't actually mailed, so I might stop in the local Dem field office to ask about that.

In either case I'm kind of glad I saw the mailer because it is a really handy guide for who NOT to vote for for some of the so-called non-partisan local positions.
posted by loquacious at 10:21 AM on October 22 [2 favorites]

After watching the HBO Telemarketers documentary I am convinced the fundraising wags the politics rather then the other way around.
posted by credulous at 10:34 AM on October 22 [3 favorites]

This problem is not new but is getting worse. See this 2021 NYT article or this 2023 NPR report. The SMS spam has gotten way more aggressive and fine-tuned as it evolves to exploit people more effectively.

The controversial feature that fools many donors is a pre-checked box campaigns use to automatically authorize recurring donations.

That's not "controversial", that is deliberate fraud. CNN does a good job documenting the dark patterns used to defraud donors in this way. Somewhere at WinRed is an HTML jockey who designed that tiny little "Make this a weekly recurring donation" disclosure. The one that tricks donors into not disabling the option.

Defaulting to recurring charges is heavily biased towards Republican fundraisers, fewer Democrats do it. I'm not sure if that's because the politicians are more honest or because WinRed is sleazier than ActBlue. There had been a rough consensus to stop doing the recurring donation scam but apparently the Republicans decided to go back to the fraud.

Trump’s campaign said two of his current fundraising committees only returned to the use of pre-checked boxes in September after pausing the practice in January 2023.

I can't imagine what the chargeback situation is like for WinRed. It must be very expensive for them to take credit card payments. The article says both WinRed and ActBlue charge politicians 4% for their service. Typical credit card processing fees are 1.5-3.5%, so I guess the donation/fraud platforms aren't being as punished as I would have thought. I wonder if Visa or someone has considered dropping WinRed entirely for the massive fraud reports they get.
posted by Nelson at 10:52 AM on October 22 [1 favorite]

After watching the HBO Telemarketers documentary I am convinced the fundraising wags the politics rather then the other way around.


elections? wait til you hear about legislation !
posted by lalochezia at 10:53 AM on October 22 [2 favorites]

Victimization of the elderly and those with cognitive disabilities is one of the major tragedies of our time. Unfortunately we lack state capacity and social trust required to deal with it

I think "lack of state capacity and social trust" is responsible for virtually every issue in the US today. Unfortunately I don't think it's a fixable issue. Societies with a higher level of trust than the US all have some combination of external stressors and a homogenous population that gets and understands each other. Trust just builds up in that sort of environment over time - it is not something you can force or create artificially.

Also as someone who cannot depend on family - I have no kids, few relatives and my spouse and sibling are older than me - I am all too aware that means I am effectively fucked.
posted by photo guy at 11:24 AM on October 22 [4 favorites]

This is some truly despicable shit.

At this point, I wouldn't be shocked if they move to reintroduce slavery.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:41 AM on October 22 [1 favorite]

So this is obviously evil, and it benefits Republicans more than Democrats. Why don't Democrats work to end it?
posted by jy4m at 12:07 PM on October 22 [3 favorites]

We recently moved my 83 year old aunt into memory care. As part of that we were unwinding her finances and she was giving $400 a month to various democratic charities on a high interest credit card. Act Blue was the biggest culprit there. And then add on the various "charities" and it was real bad. We had to threaten a lawsuit against our local PBS affiliate because they kept contacting her after receiving a certified letter stating she had declared incompetent.
posted by nestor_makhno at 12:11 PM on October 22 [7 favorites]

In the runup to the 2018 midterms and before he started declining rapidly in 2022/2023, my elderly father received over 8000 emails from Democrats in a six-week period. I couldn't count the number of texts. He was a lifelong Democrat and donated small amounts over the years, but the ActBlue stuff was so predatory. Emails that looked like forwards, responses to an email he sent, etc. Not honouring unsubscribes. The same kind of language in the emails that's detailed in TFA.

It took me weeks to clean up his inbox and it was only after I had to take over his finances entirely that I was able to get most of it to stop. If I hadn't, the dementia which creeped in in his last year of life would definitely have left him vulnerable to all of what's going on here this year. He would often place the same order from Amazon three times in a row because he didn't remember that he had ordered already. He often ordered things he had already. Frequently these orders were shipped two or three different places, none of which were where he lived.

I can't imagine what it would have been like if the political texts and emails from ActBlue poured in...
posted by Captaintripps at 12:25 PM on October 22 [2 favorites]

At this point, I wouldn't be shocked if they move to reintroduce slavery.

Well, many on the right apparently now believe that slavery was a net benefit for the slaves, so…
posted by Thorzdad at 12:38 PM on October 22 [1 favorite]

So this is obviously evil, and it benefits Republicans more than Democrats. Why don't Democrats work to end it?

This is one of the reasons Democrats are trying so hard to get more house and senate seats and trying to get Harris elected.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:55 PM on October 22 [3 favorites]

Periodic reminder to never, ever give your email address or phone number to any political donation. Physical address is required by US law but the others are optional. If a form insists you fill it out, fill out fake data.

ActBlue does require a working email address to create an account there but you can tell them not to share it with anyone.

None of this will help the "recurring donation" fraud this article mostly talks about. But it will at least prevent inbound demands for more money.
posted by Nelson at 1:29 PM on October 22 [2 favorites]

BTW, a side tangent for anyone assisting older relatives with declining faculties with finances:

Watch out for magazine subscriptions. After my late grandma had a stroke and I have a hunch that she had prepaid for like 10-20 *years* of Time, National Geographic and and other magazines because of the "This could be your last issue!" subscription inserts they put into every single issue.

When I was living with her as an assistant and caretaker it was almost every single month that I had to talk her out of sending out a new check for yet another year's subscription to multiple magazines.

I would literally have to show her the last check in her check register and have an exhausting conversation that they put those renewal cards in every single issue whether or not it was actually due to expire.

Thankfully she was totally ruthless about phone sales and scams and always shut them down - and were highly entertaining to overhear - but the magazine subscription renewal cards were a weird blind spot, because she couldn't understand why they would put them in the magazine if it wasn't due to expire.
posted by loquacious at 1:47 PM on October 22 [3 favorites]

> You are asking the government to regulate which political speech you are able to interact with.


No?

I encourage you to read the law, it's great. It gives you rights, by letting you choose what kinds of communication you get.
posted by constraint at 3:30 PM on October 22 [4 favorites]

omg, I can't finish this article at this time. It just gets worse and worse. These poor people. Then I vacillate between feeling sorry for them and this horrible victim-blaming, which makes me angry at myself. Ugh.
posted by hydra77 at 4:20 PM on October 22 [1 favorite]

Gosh, I was reading the article highlighting the misleading domain requests and I missed the word "sustained" in the Trump email.

I have been getting text messages from Kamala and Tim just about every day encouraging me to repeat the donation I made in the past. (I have made no such donations.) It has been months since they stopped offering to fly me out for coffee with Joe and Jill and Barry and Michelle. But I just clicked on one of those old messages, which took me to an ActBlue page that was happy to take my donation, even though that particular offer of coffee and airline ticket expired in December.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 4:55 PM on October 22 [1 favorite]

My demented mom gave hundreds then thousands a month to random Democrats she knew zero about through ACT BLUE before we cut her off. The whole US electoral enterprise is fucking garbage.
posted by latkes at 8:07 PM on October 22 [7 favorites]