Thread by @HoarseWisperer

Okay, this is pretty shady.

If you do a Google search for “Kamala donate” or “Mayor Pete donate” one of the top results appears to be an ActBlue page for their campaigns.

Instead, it is a page setup by “AmericaBlog Action” which siphons off half the money.

1/3

If you recall, shady griftomatic, Michael Avenatti, set up the same kind of siphon when Beto was raking in major donations.

ActBlue allows page creators to split donation recipients that way. Users can change the allocation...

2/3

...but this is clearly leveraging candidates for personal gain.

Setting up these pages for multiple candidates make it seem even more of an online grift capitalizing on donor inattention to the fine print.

Shady. Gross. May be legal but sure feels like fraud.

3/3

Turns out AmericaBlog Action was pulling the same siphon off Beto that Avenatti tried and eventually abandoned after getting outed.

Wow. Would love to see how much they’ve raked in by Trojan horsing donors into unwittingly donating to them.

thedailybeast.com/political-mone…

Wow. They’re siphoning off Cory Booker’s donors as well.

The above clicks through to a page that defaults to siphoning off half to AmericaBlog Action.

Man, what a grift.

Add Joe Biden to the list...

Okay, let me just sharpen this up to really clarify what’s so grifty about this:

1) AmericaBlog Action appears to likely be buying Google keywords

2) So, when someone searches “Donate to (candidate)” they see one of AmericaBlog’s links

3) The person clicking through often assumes it’s the campaign’s ActBlue page

4) Their donation then gets split in half and only half goes to the candidate

5) No one searching “Donate to (candidate)” is actually searching for AmericaBlog Action

6) The ActBlue page does not in any way promote (or even explain) who AmericaBlog Action even is...

7) So, an opaque group is siphoning off donor’s money by creating pages that look like campaign pages

Sooooooo grifty! Wow.

secure.actblue.com/donate/buttigi…

I have to say, I’ve seen my fair share of grifty-ass shit on here. (cough) Claude Taylor (cough). But this one is pretty high up there.

Buying candidates’ names on Google AdWords, setting up donation pages and directing half into your own pocket is a pretty big effing grift.

One postscript:

Apparently several people were posting about this over the last couple days including Mel Ankoly and @charles_gaba

Ankoly has me blocked, so I didn’t see those tweets and I somehow missed Charles’ until he fwded them to me.

No real sleuthing here on my part.

I saw some comments about it in my timeline, didn’t know the whole story so did some searching.

No pride of discovery here.