Three House committees launched probes against ActBlue over its questionable donor verification practices, Just the News reported. They found that the progressive fundraising platform changed its rules on verifying donors to make them "more lenient."
Last year, Congress began investigating Act Blue over allegations that its rules, changed at least twice, allowed foreign donors and other unverified contributions. The committees released their report with the findings on Wednesday.
The report states that the platform showed "a lack of commitment to stopping fraud and paint a picture of complacency on ActBlue’s fraud-prevention team," including fraud prevention vendor Sift. "Put simply, the documents reflect a fundamentally unserious approach to fraud prevention at ActBlue—one that has left the door open for large-scale fraud campaigns on Democrats’ top fundraising platform."
During President Joe Biden's 2024 campaign that turned into then-Vice President Kamala Harris' bid, Act Blue directed staff to "look for reasons to accept contributions." This was on top of its previous practice of not collecting the CVV codes for credit card transactions.
According to the New York Post, the GOP-led House committees found that standards changed twice during key times in the 2024 campaign season. The changes, which came in April and again in September, resulted in as many as 28 additional fraudulent contributions each month.
Moreover, they resulted in up to 6.4% of questionable donations that were missed. An internal memo showed that the company was already keyed into foreign sources, including "Brazil, Colombia, India, Iraq, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, and other countries," the news outlet noted.
"Look out for these donations: Giving to Center for American Progress Action Fund. Mostly from Brazilian donors (unlikely to give to this organization)," the memo said.
Sure enough, a December 2024 audit of "known instances of fraud" revealed hundreds of donations were collected from those countries. In addition, prepaid U.S. gift and debit cards used on another 237 donations were traced to IP addresses outside the U.S. between September and October 2024, when ActBlue shut down the option.
ActBlue has also acknowledged that it received 1,900 phony donations between September 2022 and November 2024. However, House Republicans are convinced these shady donations are more "widespread" than the company is letting on.
The report from the House Oversight and Administration Committees stated that "ActBlue acknowledges that serious gaps in its fraud prevention systems remain," the 478-page report said. "Internal communications explain that 'if someone could coordinate a big attack where each individual donation fell below the [fraud review] threshold, they would go through,'" the report went on.
It conclude that "despite repeated instances of fraudulent donations to Democrat campaigns and causes from domestic and foreign sources, ActBlue is not demonstrating a serious effort to deter fraud on its platform." The lawmakers asserted that it impacted the Biden and Harris' presidential bid.
These levels are significant as Democrats and their pet causes received almost $2 billion from donations gathered through ActBlue for the 2024 campaign. In the hours after Biden turned his bid over to Harris, she received a whopping $46.7 million went to her campaign.
"At best, ActBlue’s conduct displays a profound disrespect for the principle that only Americans should decide American elections. At worst, it may violate the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA), which states that persons who 'knowingly accept a contribution made by one person in the name of another person' may face criminal liability," the report said.
The investigations seem to suggest that untold sums of dirty money may have made it into Democrats' coffers. If it's true, that amounts to election interference of the worst kind.
