Uncle Scam Wants You … to cough up your cash and personal data, FBI warns ahead of midterms

The FBI is once again warning US citizens to be on the lookout for the scams that are so often rife around election season. With November’s midterms fast approaching, the FBI said scammers are known to use the names, imagery, and slogans of high-profile candidates for a range of frauds. These are often related to making donations and selling merchandise, but can also be geared toward stealing personal data for use in follow-on scams. And of course, more recently, fraudsters’ efforts can be all the more convincing given the rise in AI use and deepfake technology, which can also be used to more accurately imitate the likenesses of candidates and other officials. Campaign investment pool schemes are among the four big frauds the FBI wants the public to watch out for over the next few weeks. These involve scammers convincing their marks to pay into a campaign pool, which ostensibly pays out to all of those who donated after the candidate wins. More commonly, these types of pooled investment scams are based on collective investments into stocks and other appreciating assets. The FBI did not provide details about these campaign pools’ investment incentives or how victims are supposedly able to increase their stake by donating to the cause, but did say that no genuine campaign donations appreciate over time. Another common donation-based scam to be wary of is the one that convinces victims to fund a fake political action committee (PAC), one that collects supporters’ cash and promises to hand it to their favored party or candidate. Instead of forwarding money to a specific political campaign, however, the scammers pocket it all for themselves. Fraudsters are also known for claiming to sell merchandise related to political campaigns – orders that ultimately go unfulfilled. These constitute non-delivery scams, which rank in the top five genres of internet cons, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center’s (IC3) most recent annual report. The same report put phishing at the number one spot in that same list, and the classic cyberattack features on the FBI’s list of midterm-related scams, too. Creating a sense of urgency, scammers will text victims claiming they have not yet registered to vote, and asking them to follow a link to a webpage where they can enter their details and complete the process, which of course leads to identity theft. While the FBI doesn’t include this detail in its advisory, Texans should be especially wary of these communication attempts given the recent computer issues that led to a massive backlog in registration applications. As of September 22, 226, around 600,000 applications were allegedly in limbo after a website flaw failed to record voters’ intentions to vote, and therefore did not receive registration forms from the Texas Secretary of State (SOS), according to a lawsuit [PDF] filed by voter registration organizations last week. However, spokesperson for the SOS’ office Alicia Pierce told USA Today that the backlog was only in the tens of thousands and that as of this week it was all-clear. Scammers may nevertheless continue to capitalize on the public awareness of the backlog when devising the lures for their phishing campaigns. The feds advised the public to be wary of these kinds of communications, and verify all political organizations, such as PACs, via the government’s election commission website. Although some scam PACs can appear on the website as registered, you can usually discern the suspicious ones when they report high expenses for matters such as consulting, fundraising, and other admin costs. The FBI's advisory follows separate action taken by X, which on Wednesday evening warned that influence campaigns originating from Iran, Russia, and China were targeting US voters, amplifying content across the political spectrum. The social media platform responded by nuking more than 13,000 accounts linked to the foreign interference attempts. ®