James Frank Clark is a lifelong Republican who lives in Texas. He spends his time between his home in a suburb northwest of Houston and a small town called Kerrville, northwest of San Antonio. He lives in fairly conservative areas so it’s no surprise that his candidates of choice are Republicans.
That’s why he signed up to donate to GOP candidates through WinRed — an overarching political action committee (PAC) that donates to Republican candidates across the United States.
As far as he knew, he made a handful of small donations here and there. But that’s not what ended up happening.
Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show Clark made thousands of donations including as recently as in June 2024. According to his grandson Colin, who shared the data with Al Jazeera, these were made without his grandfather’s knowledge.
“They [WinRed] would come in and take $20 here and there but then they would run that transaction somewhere between 50 and 200 times,” Clark told Al Jazeera.
WinRed is allegedly overcharging and prompting recurring donations from donors like Clark without their knowledge, a problem that overwhelmingly impacts elderly voters like him.
This is an old problem with WinRed, one of the largest Republican PACs in the US. Set up in 2019, it has been under the lens of attorneys general across four US states since 2021 for overcharging consumers and deceiving them into donating more than they thought by using deceptive marketing practices.
According to records obtained by Al Jazeera, the deceptive practices have continued in the lead-up to the US presidential elections in November.
Endorsed by the Republican National Committee, WinRed has become the most prominent tool for Republican Party fundraising efforts. It is one of two major PACs – ActBlue being the other one, for the Democratic Party – raising money for ballot races for their respective political sides. Both bombard donors with over-the-top emails and text messages from candidates and their surrogates.
Both WinRed and ActBlue raise money for their respective parties, which they then distribute to various candidates. In Clark’s case, WinRed put his donations towards committees ranging from those supporting Ted Cruz for the US Senate and Donald Trump for president.
Clark was charged almost $90,000 across six different credit cards – three of which had charges well over $20,000 as recently as the end of June, as per Clark’s credit card statements, communications with WinRed, and FEC records obtained by Al Jazeera.
Clark showed Al Jazeera he had not logged into a WinRed account since 2022, which Al Jazeera has independently verified.
Even though Clark alleges that misleading texts over the years led to this, WinRed refunded donations only from the last 60 days, which came out to a little more than $59,000, leaving Clark drained and furious.
“I don’t have the energy to go through whatever I have to go through to get it [a full refund] done. If it’s anywhere close to having to deal with more of this bureaucracy, I’ll just tell them to kiss my ass,” he said.
Clark is far from alone. There are communities online that outline comparable situations including on platforms like Trustpilot and Pissed Consumer. There are also Reddit threads dedicated to this problem.
Al Jazeera reached out to dozens of impacted consumers. While there was hesitation amongst many Republicans to speak to representatives of what they described as the “liberal media”, this reporter managed to confirm the validity of some claims by cross-verifying them with FEC filings.
In one case in Arizona, an elderly man was charged upwards of $700 a week for at least a year – and it wasn’t until his wife took over his finances that she discovered the incessant charges. There was a similar situation in Indiana of a retiree living on a fixed income. Out of respect for their privacy, Al Jazeera has opted not to disclose their identities.
Dark patterns
Other sources Al Jazeera spoke to have struggled to even opt out of texts, including Kurren Kidd, a potential donor living in Bonita, California.
“Every single text link goes to WinRed, has the option to ‘repeat your donation’ automatically selected, and uses shady tactics and lies to trick you into clicking on the link. Let’s just say I’m very upset with WinRed. In my view, they are deceitful money-grabbing liars,” Kidd told Al Jazeera.
Kidd added that he gets texts from different phone numbers every day from WinRed and has been unable to opt out.
This practice is known as dark patterns — meaning deceptive language that can make it challenging to understand what a person might be signing up for — within a given website.
“Often [dark patterns] are used to get people to tie them into subscriptions that they didn’t intend to sign up for, but these donations operate in the same way,” Harry Brignull, founder of the Deceptive Patterns Initiative, a programme that raises awareness about deceptive design tactics online, told Al Jazeera.
Brignull also alleged that the hoops WinRed put in place so cancellations cannot be done over the phone — like not being able to call a customer service line, as Clark showed in emails shared with Al Jazeera — are a way to trap consumers.
“It’s like in nature how there are different kinds of predatory plants to tempt insects in and then keep trapping them basically. Those are carnivorous plants. That same phenomenon is used in business, too,” added Brignull, who also coined the term “dark patterns”.
Al Jazeera reached out to the attorney general (AG) offices in the four states investigating WinRed’s deceptive practices. Connecticut’s AG office declined to comment. Minnesota’s office, while they declined to comment on specifics, confirmed to Al Jazeera that the office is still actively investigating WinRed. The other two offices — New York and Maryland — did not respond.
Even prior to the 2020 presidential election, the PAC faced a class-action lawsuit for deceptive practices. The suit alleged that the PAC sent automated text messages without written consent from voters to do so.
In 2021, the New York Times reported that WinRed included pre-checked boxes allowing for recurring donations. Consumers could opt out, but the process was buried deep in the fine print during the 2020 election, which put many consumers at risk.
By June 2020, it added a second pre-checked box which doubled recurring donations to former US President Trump, leading the four states to file a lawsuit against the PAC.
The new pre-checked boxes came as the Trump campaign claimed it had raised $210m that August — weeks after WinRed introduced the new feature of doubling recurring donations. By the end of the year, WinRed then had to issue $122m in refunds to consumers.
Not refundable
Where the donor money ends up has been in question, too. In 2022, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint to the FEC against WinRed alleging that it failed to disclose operating expenses. At the time of the complaint, it was alleged that WinRed raked in $144m in fees alone since its launch. The organisation’s website says processing fees are not refundable.
In emails reviewed by Al Jazeera, WinRed told Clark that he could only be refunded for donations made in the last 60 days — nothing earlier, nor any processing fees.
Numerous allegations that WinRed drains unsuspecting small donors are coming as the Trump campaign touts substantial fundraising numbers this election cycle.
While this is overwhelmingly a larger problem in the Republican camp, Democrats can’t show a clean record, either. ActBlue, the Democratic Party alternative, has also faced its fair share of accusations of misconduct. In 2021, the same four state attorneys general mentioned above inquired about the group’s alleged pre-checked box policy practice — comparable to the allegations against WinRed.
“ActBlue’s policy requires groups using pre-set recurring forms to explicitly ask donors for recurring contributions immediately before the donor clicks the link to give. Our goal is to ensure our contribution forms are as clear and transparent as possible for donors,” ActBlue told Al Jazeera in a statement.
Refunds to Democratic small donors have been more consistent, and for lesser amounts. In the 2020 election cycle, ActBlue’s returns totalled $21m, with no large surges or dips one way or the other throughout the last presidential race.
WinRed did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Dark patterns are not just a problem in political fundraising, but also across many facets of American consumerism – including in some cases where consumers inadvertently sign up for recurring charges buried in the fine print.
“The use of ‘pre-checked boxes’ in online campaign fundraising has been a long-standing problem leading to countless donors unwittingly giving money to candidates and PACs that they never consciously intended to donate. This unscrupulous practice continues partly because Congress and the FEC have failed to take action against it,” Saurav Ghosh, director of the Federal Campaign Finance Reform Program at the Campaign Legal Center, told Al Jazeera.
There have been attempts to outlaw dark patterns, but those haven’t come to fruition.
Members of the US Senate including Democrat Mark Warner and Republican John Thune have introduced legislation several times that would outlaw these dark patterns by prohibiting companies from purposely designing platforms that make it hard for consumers to fully understand what they’re consenting to when signing up for a service. Most recently, the group put up the legislation in 2023. But it has yet to make it past committee.
