DONATE NOW: How Political Fundraisers Wrung Millions Out of People With Dementia

You receive a text message from an unknown number: “I wrote this memo just for you and I really need you to take a look BEFORE this weekend! Please read every word here.”  

It’s another fundraising text from a political campaign. And if you click the link in the message, it takes you to a screen where you can enter your credit card information or PayPal login.

You might just delete the message and move on. 

But not everyone is so quick to recognize these fundraising text messages for what they are.

In this year’s contentious and fast-moving campaign, when people living with cognitive impairment or a neurodegenerative disease received text messages like the one described above from both Republican and Democratic fundraising groups, they were more likely to read it at face value: a direct, personal plea for help from an individual. And, as CNN reported, this group of Americans donated, and in some cases, signed up unwittingly for recurring donations, draining, in some cases large amounts of money from their savings. 

Studies show people living with mild cognitive impairment or dementia are known to have more trouble managing their finances than cognitively healthy people. And in fact, studies show issues with missed credit card payments, uncharacteristic sudden debt, or falling victim to a financial scam often come among the first signs of dementia.

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According to CBS, a call-blocking service called Robokiller shared that Americans received a record 15 billion political campaign texts in 2022 — and 2024 is expected to exceed that.

In CNN’s report, across 52 people living with dementia and their family members interviewed, individuals typically donated $5 or $10 at a time, and just from this group of 52 people, political campaign donations amounted to more than $6 million over a period of five years.  

Donors withdrew money from pensions, social security accounts, and retirement funds, and in some cases, they opened new credit cards in order to be able to give more. 

Often, people had recurring donations running month after month without realizing it, in some cases draining bank accounts. Because the fundraising platforms exchange donor information and the text campaigns are designed to snowball, some people were found to have made more than 100 donations in a single day.

“One 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones, didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020,” CNN reported.

While these fundraising tactics are under-regulated, they are legal. The messages’ persuasiveness is by design, and dementia care expert and Positive Approach to Care founder Teepa Snow believes older adults with compromised cognitive faculties in areas like executive reasoning are specifically targeted.

“These deceptive text messages are deliberately designed to capture the attention of people living with cognitive limitations who may no longer have the complex reasoning skills required to assess their legitimacy,” Snow told Being Patient.

How to fool a donor

Two digital platforms, WinRed and ActBlue, are used by Republican and Democratic campaigns and political action committees to raise funds. 

If you’re on one donor list, your personal information will likely be swapped and sold to other campaigns on the platform. CNN spoke with donors who sometimes donated more than 100 times in a single day because they received messages from multiple campaigns simultaneously. 

In addition, many campaigns used a deceptive feature that pre-checked a box authorizing recurrent donations. Though some Democrat candidates moved away from using the pre-checked box, both presidential campaigns currently use this feature.

The aggressive fundraising tactics used by these platforms have spurred hundreds of complaints with the Federal Trade Commission. Since 2022, 803 complaints relate to advertising tactics from the Republican WinRed platform and 120 against ActBlue. 

“The fact there are lots of complaints means this is likely a huge problem,” Prentiss Cox, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former manager of consumer protection at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, told CNN. “From a consumer protection standpoint, this raises red flag level concerns about consumer misinformation and deception.”

Between July 2019 and June 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign directly collected more than $400,000 from the donors who spoke to CNN. National committees that raise money for Republican House and Senate races were a close second. Two major Democratic political action committees each received over $120,000 from this group of donors. Both the Kamala Harris and Trump campaigns used pre-checked “recurring donations” boxes, making it easier for donors to unwittingly sign up to repeat their donations weekly or monthly, when they may have intended to only give once. 

Fighting to get their life savings back

Some families are fighting to have unwittingly donated money returned.

When one man discovered his 80-year-old father’s savings account was nearly emptied from having given away nearly half a million dollars in campaign donations, both the son and the father were shocked. “When I found this out and started showing Dad, he was shocked, he had no idea,” the son told CNN. “He’s not a man to give anyone what he considered his life savings.”

He took his father to a neurologist where he was diagnosed with dementia. Then, the son spent weeks turning off recurring donations, canceling credit cards, and disputing charges. After weeks of complaints and demands for refunds, he has so far managed to reclaim some $151,000 of a total $449,000 donated to Republican campaign fundraising platform WinRed.

According to Federal Trade Commission data reported by CNN, the FTC received 120 complaints about ActBlue, and 803 complaints (approximately seven times more) about WinRed between January 2022 through June 2024.

Experts say stronger regulations — rules that restrict how these companies operate — should help to protect vulnerable targets of these campaigns.

In fact, the FTC has sued non-political companies, including Amazon, that used similar tactics to mislead text message recipients but so far haven’t targeted misleading political messages. According to experts who spoke to CNN, the lawmakers who would need to take a stand to protect consumers are currently benefiting from deceptive fundraising tactics. 

How to protect your loved ones finances

Scamming older Americans is a profitable industry. In 2023, the FTC estimated that older Americans lost $61.5 billion due to fraud. Unfortunately, many losses go unreported because people are embarrassed to come forward.

There are plenty of standard financial scams to look out for. A fake tech support person is calling you to say that your phone or computer is hacked and you need to buy gift cards to cover the cost of an antivirus. An unsolicited prize notification asks you to deposit money to collect a prize you never entered to win. A sweetheart scam where someone builds a rapport and exclaims their love, only to later bamboozle your money away.

However, text messages for political donations are different. They don’t originate from lone scammers, and they acquire contact information legally. 

Snow advocates taking preemptive steps to protect loved ones from being exploited by predatory fundraising campaigns, which can be devastating even when they are completely, technically legal.

“Instead of waiting for a crisis to occur,” Snow said, “those who support these individuals may wish to strongly consider restricting or monitoring their access to their phones and financial accounts.”