The New York Times released a blockbuster report on how Trump fleeced his online donors, including those in hospice.
The campaign billed donors for weekly donations by programming their page to accept "weekly" as a default. The "opt-out" button was hidden below fine print, which got longer as the "campaign" dragged on.
These extra donations kept his campaign afloat while his emptying unwitting supporter's bank accounts to do so.
As P.T. Barnum has often been quoted as saying, 'there's a sucker born every day.' The Trump campaign took that mantra to unconscionable heights.
[This fundraising] 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.
Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out. As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.
Read the whole NY Times article because it's damning to TraitorTrump and his entire organization. They knew how difficult it is for non-computer savvy people to wade through pages and pages of disclaimers to find out that they were tricked into making recurring donations. the Times story says that the Trump campaign prechecked those recurring boxes for its donors. If a person didn't uncheck those boxes they were being billed weekly to sustain the Seditious Ex.
MSNBC's Morning Joe did a good segment on this story
"People having to shut down their bank accounts, people having to shut down their credit cards, people having all of the money siphoned out by the Trump campaign," Scarborough said.
We hope criminal charges are forthcoming.
Digby writes in her Salon piece 'A Con man From the very beginning,' "The sheer number of refunds to Trump donors amounted to a huge no-interest (and profitable for WinRed) loan to the campaign — a loan which required that the people loaning the money go to a great deal of trouble get money back which they didn’t consciously agree to “loan” in the first place. Trump’s post-election “Stop the Steal” fundraising at least partially went to pay off those “loans” from the campaign making the whole scheme very “Ponzi-esque.”
