It appears that Donald Trump continued to take enormous sums of money from his supporters even after the 2020 presidential election was over.
A new report from The New York Times reveals that the ex-president issued US$122.7 million ($174.6m) in refunds to his supporters last year, which amounted to 11 per cent of the money Trump’s campaign raised.
The publication’s findings were based on a review of Federal Election Commission filings.
Beginning last summer, Trump’s campaign and WinRed–the company that handled online donations–added pre-checked recurring payment boxes to online donations.
The suit alleges that Fox News sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.
Contributors weren’t aware that they had to manually uncheck the boxes unless they read the disclaimer. If they didn’t check the fine print, then contributors’ credit cards were charged weekly until the day of the election.
In the days before the election, the campaign “made that disclaimer increasingly opaque,” The Times writes, and even added a second pre-checked box that doubled the donation.
Banks soon became “inundated with fraud complaints” from Trump supporters who didn’t realise they had agreed to recurring contributions.
The Times reports that in late 2020, several banks and one of the US’s leading credit card companies revealed that these cases constituted up to three percent of all fraud complaints.
Jason Miller, a Trump spokesperson, shut down these claims of fraud, telling the publication that internal data concluded that only .87 per cent of transactions saw credit card disputes.
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