The United States former President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign issued a staggering total of 122.7 million dollars in refunds to supporters last year, giving back nearly 11 percent of the money it raised, according to an investigative report published Saturday by the New York Times based on Federal Election Commission filings’ analysis.

Major Facts

New York Times’ analysis revealed that beginning summer 2020, the Donald Trump effort and WinRed, the company that processed its online offerings, began to initiate the use of prechecked multiple payment boxes while processing online donations.

According to the report, unless contributors inspected the fine print of an online disclaimer and manually unchecked an opt-out box, the donor’s credit card would be charged weekly until Election Day arrived.  

In the lead-up to the election, the campaign “made that disclaimer increasingly opaque,” the Times asserts, and in due course added a second prechecked box that automatically twofold a donor’s contribution.

Eventually, financial institutions became flooded with fraud complaints from Donald Trump followers who agreed to these recurring charges unknowingly.

According to the Times’ report, several banks and one of the country’s larger credit-card companies affirmed that these cases accounted for up to 3 percent of all fraud complaints received at a point late last year.

Forbes has reached out to Mr. Trump’s representatives for a statement but didn’t immediately hear back.

Jason Miller, Donald Trump spokesperson, rebuffed the widespread fraud claims, telling the Times internal data determined 0.87 percent of its WinRed transactions were subject to formal credit card disputes. Miller said that they had a dispute rate of less than one percent of total offerings despite raising more grass-roots money than any campaign in U.S. history is remarkable.

Main Background

In spite of Donald Trump’s loss of the November 3, 2020 election to Joe Biden, the campaign’s push for contributions didn’t die down. Baseless claiming that the 2020 Presidential election had been stolen, Mr. Trump urged his followers to fund his struggle to Stop The Steal.

Federal Election Commission filings released in January 2021 from WinRed displayed that Donald Trump garnered 255.4 million dollars in political offerings from his followers in the 8 weeks after November 3 election.

Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee raised more than 2 million dollars daily on WinRed from early November through December 14, the Electoral College vote day. Moreover, E-mail requests were a crucial element of Trump’s appeals for cash.

CNN reported that Trump’s campaign sent above four hundred emails and 130 text messages requesting contributions in the first thirty days after the election.

The NYT analysis of FEC filings determined that last year the Joe Biden campaign’s refund rate on donations was just 2.2 percent.

Russell Blatt told the Times that it intuited like it was a scam, after his family identified 3000 dollars withdrawal from his brother’s (Stacy Blatt) account; Blatt, 63 was battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than 1000 dollars per month.

0.72 million dollars was the average daily sum that the Donald Trump campaign refunded to donors in December 2020.

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