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Some rake in donations for illegitimate political campaigns for figures like Laura Ingraham and Congressman Allen West. Others latch onto specific issues like veterans’ rights or regions like the Virgin Islands.
Some use mail campaigns to convince older, retired donors to send them money. Others use social media and aggressive call campaigns.
They’re hard to track and harder to regulate because “scam PACs” — committees that claim to be raising money for political campaigns but spend little to none of the proceeds on political activity — are what experts call a “know-it-if-you-see-it situation.”
“A scam PAC would be a political committee that raises funds with the purpose of supporting candidates or a particular cause, but then instead of spending the money raised to support candidates or causes, the political operatives running the PAC pay themselves,” Brendan Fischer of Campaign Legal Center said.
The Center for Responsive Politics identified PACs that have spent at least $100,000 so far in the 2018 cycle, at least half of which went to “fundraising” as identified by CRP. (We assign expenditures to categories based on information disclosed in FEC filings, as described here).
Spending on fundraising is not necessarily shady; some groups put most of their money into fundraising early in the cycle, then make contributions or independent expenditures later in the cycle. However, our research identified a number of groups that have a pattern of wasting their donors’ money.
These PACs will often spend large chunks of their money on fundraising campaigns, allocating the rest to salaries, administrative costs and overhead. In order to pocket the money they generate, those PACs will often pay inflated service fees to firms they’re affiliated with.
Take Sheriff David Clarke for US Senate. The draft committee used inflammatory fundraising emails that raised $2 million to entice the former Milwaukee sheriff to run for a Wisconsin Senate seat against…