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  • 2016-09-16 (xsd:date)
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  • Clinton Campaign Overcharging Poor Donors? (en)
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  • On 15 September 2016, the New York Observer — based on a single, three-month old complaint — published an article reporting that Hillary Clinton's campaign was systematically stealing money from low-income supporters by using stored credit card information provided by one-time donors to make multiple unauthorized charges: The Observer talked to Carol Mahre, a Minnesota woman who said back in June 2016 that she made a $25 one-time donation to Clinton in March 2016 but was subsequently charged, in apparent random fashion, $25 twice more on one day in March and another $19 a few weeks later: The Observer article stated an anonymous source had told them that about 100 people per day were complaining about spurious Clinton campaign charges to Wells Fargo alone, a figure which spread across all financial institutions would suggest that thousand and thousands of Clinton donors were reporting similar fraud issues every month. But — even though this fraud has supposedly been taking place since Spring 2016, we weren't able to find instances of more such complaints on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media platform or forum, outside of two January 2016 Twitter pleas from someone seeking assistance in canceling a recurring donation: It's possible that the single complainant (on whom the entire Observer article was based) inadvertently signed up for a recurring donation, accidentally triggered multiple charges by clicking submit more than once, and/or was simply the victim of an isolated glitch that caused the duplicate charges. Without additional documentation, it's difficult to verify that the issue demonstrates (as the Observer suggested) a deliberate and pervasive form of fraud. We contacted Wells Fargo's fraud department in an attempt to verify the breadth of fraudulent charge issue, and after placing us on hold, a representative ambiguously stated that the rumor had nothing to do specifically with the campaign of Hillary Clinton (which could mean anything from the rumor is baseless to it's a merchant/processor issue). We also contacted Wells Fargo's media relations division, who said nothing beyond We have no comment at this time. (en)
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