With the general election a few months away and presidential candidates aggressively fundraising before Election Day, election-related scams are likely to become increasingly common, according to Thomas Dearden, an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Tech.
Because political donations increase at this time of an election year, it’s an opportune time for scammers to take advantage, he said.
“This is one of those ways that they can develop illegitimate opportunities to donate,” Dearden said.
It’s becoming difficult to figure out whether an unsolicited link is real, so Dearden recommends avoiding them entirely.
Anyone interested in making a political donation should go through a candidate’s website, he said, “rather than any unsolicited link that you may receive through text message, email, social media, any of those things.”
In the weeks before the election, scammers can turn to social media, emails, text messages or robocalls to contact potential donors, Dearden said.
Regardless of the platform, some of the scams are tied to political action committees (PACs). Those happen when someone “says we are going have an idea or a campaign that we are funding, and indeed they are not funding that campaign or that idea,” Dearden said.
Such PACs have to be registered, so potential donors can check their legitimacy online before moving forward.
Voter registration fraud similarly pops up, Dearden said. Those instances involve a person trying to get someone to sign up to vote “on some type of illegitimate website to get your personal information,” he said.
“We also even see fraudulent voter opinion polls, where they’re trying to get your information about who you’re going to vote for, and then get your personal information or even ask you to send money their direction,” Dearden said.
The best advice for anyone who’s become a scam victim of these fraudulent sites is to report it when it happens.
That information, Dearden said, can be reported to a local FBI office or the Internet Crime Complaint Center if it happens online.
“What we’ve discovered really is that these scams are not obvious, and they are fooling people who are very intelligent and individuals who even study this,” Dearden said.
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