Right now, your phone and inbox are likely inundated with requests for political donations. These texts, emails, and phone calls often describe things in desperate terms, placing the outcome of an election squarely on your shoulders. You might want to donate to the candidates you support, or to fund the causes that are in line with your beliefs, but it's important to be aware that many of these donation solicitations are scams, often buttressed by clever social engineering and slick AI-generated imagery or media. If you want to donate, how can you know that you’re donating to the real deal and not to a political scam?
First, you can avoid practical all political donation scams by following a couple of simple best practices:
Never click on any link sent to you (via email, text, or social media). If you’re persuaded by the messaging, look up the official campaign site or political action committee (PAC) you want to donate to.
Always research any organization or PAC before you give them money—the Federal Election Commission (FEC) maintains a list of registered PACs. If it’s not on the list, don’t donate.
Never give in to pressure on the phone—there’s no reason you need to donate by giving out your credit card information right then and there. Just tell the person you’re convinced and you’ll donate via the website.
Always use a credit card—never send a check or use a debit card. Credit cards have robust protections against scams, and shady PACs sometimes urge you to send a check because it’s so much harder to stop payment and claw your money back.
If you like the ease and convenience of simply responding to a text or clicking on a link, you can try looking for one of these signs that you’re dealing with a political donation scam:
If you’re being solicited for political donations on TikTok, or being directed to a TikTok account for donation information, it’s a scam. TikTok banned all political fundraising a few years ago, and has some pretty strict rules around political content in general. That means that just seeing TikTok somewhere in the process is a tipoff that someone is either looking to scam you, or at the very least trying to run under the radar.
There are only two questions an organization seeking political contributions should ask you (see below)—if the text, email, or phone caller wants your personal information (address, etc.), they’re probably more about identity theft or selling your information to marketers than the political cause. All anyone needs to take your donation is your credit card info and your name.
If it’s a PAC asking for a donation, the one question they must ask you is who your employer is. That’s because legitimate PACs are forbidden by law from accepting money from federal contractors and foreign nationals, so it’s necessary for them to make sure you’re neither before they accept your money. That means if they don’t ask this question, you’re probably dealing with a scammer who does not care.
If you’re thinking about donating to a PAC because they seem to support issues that you support, you should check them out before doing anything. Start with the FEC list mentioned above to make sure it’s a legitimate, registered organization. But you should also look up the PAC and visit the website the committee has set up (Open Secrets has a search page where you can find a lot of information about PACs). If you can’t identify anyone or there’s no contact information, it might be better to skip this donation and direct your cash elsewhere.
You should easily find a list of the people in charge and financial information, including a breakdown of how much of the money they raise goes anything but actually advocating for a cause. For example, Open Secrets found a bunch of PACs that spent anywhere from 74% to 93.5% of the money they raised on “fundraising”—meaning they blew it all on internal stuff like salaries, bonuses, and other “administrative” costs. If you can’t find this info, or it looks like they spend more on office space than advocacy, skip the link.
Finally, any political donation request that wants a non-standard form of payment is a scam. All legitimate campaigns and PACs accept credit cards. If the process of giving them money is convoluted or requires using only one very specific method of payment (like cryptocurrency, or gift cards) and claims good old-fashioned credit cards are no good, it’s almost certainly a scam.
