Follow the Money, Money, Money

[darrels joy]

Obama campaign's deliberate invitation to pre-paid credit-card fraud is the sort of flesh-eating political bacteria that may doom any Obama presidency
Posted by: Bill Dyer at 2:45 AM

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)
Fully $100 million of the record-breaking $150 million that the Obama campaign collected in September alone came over the internet via credit card donations. The Obama campaign has deliberately turned off the anti-fraud mechanisms available for internet credit card transactions. They have no clue how many millions or tens of millions of dollars have been donated to them in violation of federal election law. And now it turns out that the Obama campaign cheerfully takes even contributions from untraceable pre-paid credit cards, a/k/a "the pseudo-credit cards you use when you want to conceal illegal activity."
http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/blog/...8-93a7c796b1d6
This newest disclosure about the pre-paid credit cards, along with belated mainstream media confirmation of what the right hemisphere of the blogosphere has been screaming about for a week now (that someone in the Obama campaign deliberated turned off the normal default-value anti-fraud mechanisms that are standard for processing credit card charges among honest people), comes in Tuesday's Washington Post.
But it didn't even make the front page. (It's buried on page A02; emphasis in quotes below mine.)

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor's identity, campaign officials confirmed.
Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.
The Obama organization said its extensive review has ensured that the campaign has refunded any improper contributions, and noted that Federal Election Commission rules do not require front-end screening of donations.
In recent weeks, questionable contributions have created headaches for Obama's accounting team as it has tried to explain why campaign finance filings have included itemized donations from individuals using fake names, such as Es Esh or Doodad Pro. Those revelations prompted conservative bloggers to further test Obama's finance vetting by giving money using the kind of prepaid cards that can be bought at a drugstore and cannot be traced to a donor.
The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.
"They have opened the floodgates to all this money coming in," said Sean Cairncross, chief counsel to the Republican National Committee. "I think they've made the determination that whatever money they have to refund on the back end doesn't outweigh the benefit of taking all this money upfront."
The Obama campaign has shattered presidential fundraising records, in part by capitalizing on the ease of online giving. Of the $150 million the senator from Illinois raised in September, nearly $100 million came in over the Internet .

Credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discovery) are the only way you can donate to Barack Obama's campaign via his internet website.

The whole "back-end screening" farce is insulting to anyone with a second-grade education. The Obama campaign cannot possibly have any objective measurement to even roughly estimate how many mistakes and how many episodes of deliberate fraud they're catching versus how many they're simply missing, even if one is naive enough to presume their good-faith best efforts.

Moreover, everything the Obama campaign has yet said about this entire issue utterly ignores the key questions: (1) Who ordered the anti-fraud protections turned off? And (2) why hasn't Barack Obama already fired every such person, and exposed them for criminal prosecution as aiders and abettors of national and international campaign contribution fraud?

Juan Proano, whose technology firm handled online contributions for John Edwards's presidential primary campaign, and for John F. Kerry's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2004, said it is possible to require donors' names and addresses to match those on their credit card accounts. But, he said, some campaigns are reluctant to impose that extra layer of security.
"Honestly, you want to have the least amount of hurdles in processing contributions quickly," Proano said.
Sen. John McCain's campaign has also had questionable donations slip through.
Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's communication's director, said that "no organization can fully insulate itself from these problems. The McCain campaign has accepted contributions from fraudulent contributors like 'A for You,' 'Adorable Manabat,' 'The Gun Shop,' and 'Jesus II' and hundreds of anonymous donors."
But R. Rebecca Donatelli, who handles online contributions for the McCain operation and the RNC, said security measures have been standard in the GOP nominee's fundraising efforts throughout the campaign. She said she was "flabbergasted" to learn that the Obama campaign accepts prepaid cards.

Those submitting phony names along with contributions to the McCain campaign have managed to trick the system despite the anti-fraud measures used by merchants, meaning, for example, that they've matched up legitimate addresses for the card-numbers being used. That necessarily limits the scale of the fraud.
But when you take the approach endorsed by Juan "Let the Crooks Donate Too!" Proano, with the "least amount of hurdles in processing contributions quickly," then you invite crime. You put up a neon sign saying "We Can't Catch You When You Cheat!"

Where is the principled, honest Democrat of national prominence who will step up to a public microphone and say — "Not me! I will no longer stand silent while my party's presidential nominee continues to shelter the person or people who made the decision to encourage this fraud!" (See my previous post on this subject, For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul? Still no takers.)
This is beyond disgraceful. This is beyond being a mere matter for partisan criticism.
This isn't even a "cancer" on the Obama campaign, because even the worst cancers don't move this fast and aren't this virulent.

This is an infectious disease, an antibiotic-resistant acute contagion of corruption, a type of flesh-eating political bacteria that will — best case for Democrats, unless immediately disinfected starting today by their candidate himself — rob their would-be president elect of any political legitimacy even before Election Day, much less before the inauguration. In both scope and consequence, this bodes to make Watergate look like a playground fist-fight among kindergartners.
To paraphrase a young Tennessee lawyer named Fred Thompson who was then assisting Senator Howard Baker (R-TN) and the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities: What did the wanna-be president know, and when did he know it?

[darrels joy]

Because many of our colleagues in the media have failed to investigate the shenanigans of the Obama Campaign, I have taken upon myself to uncover some improprieties. One that has troubled me greatly is Obama's very relaxed donation policies.

I have over 8 years experience working in the payment services industry.

By taking a closer look at Obama's online donation site, I have noticed that his team has left the door wide open for credit card fraud by not putting in the security measures to ensure full visa/mastercard authorization compliance. This is outright irresponsible behavior on the part of Obama's team and in direct violation of their agreement with Visa/Mastercard.

I did a test on his site. Acting as Joe Stalin, I went onto the Obama site and donated $5.00. I used false information, address: 100 Red Square, telephone number 323-666-1953, zip code 10001, Employer: Kremlin Occupation: Dictator. I did use my valid credit card numbers and expiration date. The typical security measures, Address Verification System and the Card Validation Code are not present on the Obama site. So there is nothing in place to verify who I am. (Please see attachment. [I have his attachment. I see no point in putting it up; we all know Obama's site allows this -- ace.]) I clicked submit. The transaction went through.

Then I went to McCain's site, and entered in the same information. Joe Stalin. $5.00. As you can see, my donation was rejected for errors.

* What's the big deal? Obama has left the door open for anyone to run prepaid cards and foreign credit cards without proper screening. In addition, it is easy to run multi-transactions on the same card but under different aliases. In other words, an organization like Move On.org could run tens of thousands of transactions for millions of dollars using essentially cards belonging to only handful of very large liberal donors like George Soros, Peter Lewis and Eric Schmidt.

In addition, Obama's site violates his agreement with Visa/Mastercard. Visa Mastercard regulations require each credit card acceptor to "obtain the 3 digit Card Validation Code [CVV2 found on the back of your credit card. 4 digits for American Express Cards] and submit this code with all authorization requests with respect to transactions where the card is not present..." [cite:] Visa/Master Program Guide.

(Please see attachment or go to Obama's site. You will notice that Obama's donation site does not have this code requirement, which is in direct violation of Visa/Mastercard regulations.)

Speculations as to why?

Many foreign credit cards do not have CVV2 codes. Requiring such codes would limit foreign donations.

Secondly, disabling the security allows would be credit card thieves to "ping" numbers till they get a hit. In other words, a crook could simply type in random numbers until he found one sequence that worked in some fashion. That could give a thief a starting point for committing credit-card fraud. If all they had to do was type nonsense values for names and addresses, such as Doodad Pro, they could quickly determine which numbers were valid - and they could probably program bots to do that kind of work.

[I consider this latter point a minor concern, given the fact that most fraudulent donors are willing coconspirators, not credit card thieves.

However, it is interesting that Obama invites this sort of fraud, and doesn't take the most elemental step to eliminate it -- indeed, he is in direct violation of Visa/Master Card rules in failing to ask for this code.

Why? Because he wants foreign donations, and he's willing to facilitate the occasional credit-card thief to get them. -- ace.]

No Address Verification System (AVS)

The Value of AVS from a credit card exper: I have over 30 years of experience in investigating Credit Card Fraud and I can tell you, which you may or may not know, that the merchant acquirer that is conducting the collection of credit / debit card for the Obama campaign are responsible for the actions to be taken regarding the Address Verification System responses.

The value of the AVS system is that the issuer of the card being used provides back to the merchant acquirer a response based upon the information provided during the authorization process.

This response indicates to the merchant acquirer if the card information was validated as to ownership of the account. It is the merchant acquirer that determines what to do when the authorization response is received. In most cases the transaction that comes back with any negative meaning is denied. However, if the merchant acquirer has adjusted their system to accept any response as acceptable the transaction would be completed.

The value of the AVS system is to deny Card Not Present transactions (CNP) which are suspicious. This protects the merchant against charge backs for bad transactions.

What is interesting to me is that the merchant acquirer has knowingly violated a basic CNP fraud prevention technique to accommodate a merchant (Obama Campaign). I think that both the Associations (VISA & MasterCard) would be highly interested in looking at the merchant acquirer that was processing these transactions.

The value of ignoring the AVS responses is that multiple invalid transactions may be made without fear of being rejected by the authorization systems. This means that the real owner of the credit card account is willing to allow multiple transactions to be made on the account using different names and addresses that under normal conditions would be denied. The merchant acquirer has a complete listing of all transactions done and it would be very interesting to see how many transactions were conducted on the same account number using different names. I would think that this would be a Federal violation under the current campaign funding laws.

I hope you will take this inquiry seriously. I want a fair election. I do not want either side to STEAL the election literally. Obama's tactics have gone too far in my opinion. McCain is doing the honorable thing on his site and playing by the rules. Obama is in clear violation of the rules. Is this change we can believe in?

[darrels joy]

The Obama Campaign’s Credit-Card Crack-up
Posted By Tom Blumer On November 2, 2008

The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has been and may still be accepting credit-card and prepaid-card contributions from overseas. It has done so in a way that may very likely prevent it from refunding the contributions to “donors,” many of whom may have had their credit cards used without their consent. It’s virtually impossible that the system for accepting card contributions was inadvertently set up without adequate controls, and almost certain that existing controls were instead deliberately disabled to create untraceability. Finally, it is likely that the total dollar amounts involved run in millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars.


In mid-August, Pamela Geller [1] of Atlas Shrugs, writing at American Thinker, summarized a pattern [2] of irregularities she had found. Geller, and readers who assisted her, discovered that:

• “Obama’s overseas (foreign) contributors are making multiple small donations, ostensibly in their own names, over a period of a few days, some under maximum donation allowances, but others are aggregating in excess of the maximums when all added up.”
• The contributions had come from over 50 specifically named countries and major cities.
• Obviously bogus contributor names that a 7 year-old would have known to be fictitious, including “Hbkjb, jkbkj,” “Doodad Pro,” and “Good Will,” were frequent.
• “Thousands of Obama’s foreign donations ended in cents.” US contributors very rarely contribute in anything other than whole dollar amounts, so the reason why contributions would end with anything other than “.00″ would almost always involve foreign currency translation.

[3] In a later post, Geller listed 18 donors who had contributed more than the legal $2,300 limit. “Good Will” and “Doodad Pro” were among them, to the tune of over ten grand each.

You might think “Well that’s pretty bad, but really no big deal, because at some point, Obama will just refund the money.”

In many cases, that does not appear likely.

On October 22, Geller’s “[4] Who Is John Galt?” post revealed information that should have set off alarms in newsrooms across America — namely, that anyone could pretend to be someone else, with someone else’s address, and successfully process a credit-card donation to Obama. Reader Craig reported the following (bold is mine):

I’ve read recent reports of the Obama campaign receiving donations from dubious names and foreign locales and it got me wondering; how is this possible?

I run a small internet business and when I process credit cards I’m required to make sure the name on the card exactly matches the name of the customer making the purchase. Also, the purchasers address must match that of the cardholders. If these don’t match, then the payment isn’t approved. Period. So how is it possible that the Obama campaign could receive donations from fictional people and places? Well, I decided to do a little experiment. I went to the Obama campaign website and entered the following:

Name: John Galt; Address: 1957 Ayn Rand Lane; City: Galts Gulch; State: CO; Zip: 99999

Then I checked the box next to $15 and entered my actual credit card number and expiration date (it didn’t ask for the 3-digit code on the back of the card) and it took me to the next page and “Your donation has been processed. Thank you for your generous gift.”

This simply should not, and could not, happen in any business or any campaign that is honestly trying to vet its (sic) donors.

How can this happen? Here’s how (found at the same Atlas post; bolds are mine):

Having worked for companies that process credit cards online, it is necessary to go through and manually disable the safeguards that they put in place to verify a person’s address and zip code with the cardholder’s bank. But international banks don’t currently have the same safeguards that banks in the US have, which also works in the One’s favor.So most likely they’ve disabled the necessary safeguards for US cards …..

The disabled components involved are part of what is known as the “AVS” (Automated Verification System). Many bloggers and blog commenters have confirmed the accuracy of the just-excerpted claims, including the fact that the merchant has to take proactive steps to rewrite or disable existing programming and controls to make AVS not work.

This information would indicate that Team Obama does not know (or pretends not to know; that would be for investigators to determine) who specifically has donated much of its campaign money — and the fact that they don’t know is deliberate.

Further, the lack of controls in Obama’s campaign-contribution system enables [5] the use of prepaid cards, which if paid for in cash, are more than likely completely untraceable without going back to store video recordings, most of which are discarded or overwritten after a short time.

From all appearances, in both cases — unverified credit-card and prepaid-card contributions — it is very likely that the Obama campaign couldn’t refund monies received even if it wanted to. Donations to Obama are making it to statements of cardholders who [6] never authorized them. The only people who might get their money back are the ones who catch the charges. And what about charges to stolen or forged cards?

Despite many tests, no one has been able to show that these material control weaknesses exist in the McCain-Palin contributions system.

Meanwhile, though space doesn’t permit fully chronicling the specifics, America’s mainstream Obama-mad media has been negligent in covering this astonishing story, either failing to report it at all (which [7] Clay Waters of NewsBusters has noted is the case at the New York Times), or blandly understating the severity and, if you will, audacity of the enterprise (Washington Post, [8] October 25 and [9] October 28; [10] National Journal).

If this were John McCain’s campaign, a deafening “what did he know and when did he know it?” chorus would have begun well over a week ago.

As it is, most voters have cast or will cast their presidential ballots totally unaware of what may very well be the largest and most highly-organized campaign-finance fraud in US elections history.

As they do, they should be asking, “What did Obama know and when did he know it?”

---

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-oba...card-crack-up/
URLs in this post:
[1] of Atlas Shrugs: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/
[2] of irregularities: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/...tions_sil.html
[3] In a later post: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/a...-congtrib.html
[4] Who Is John Galt?: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/a...-john-gal.html
[5] the use of prepaid cards: http://www.investors.com/editorial/e...cle&id=3102592
07775310

[6] never authorized them: http://www.myfoxkc.com/myfox/pages/N...&locale=EN-US&
layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.2.1

[7] Clay Waters of NewsBusters: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/clay-wa...s-absent-ny-ti
mes

[8] October 25: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102502302.html
[9] October 28: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...3.html?sub=new
[10] National Journal: http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonl...81024_9865.php

[reconeil]

Well, so much for America's Department of Justice.
Guess if "They" can't just get on likes of The Martha Stewart Case,
some petty minority complaints or absurd accusations against Republicans,...
there's not much else that they're actually good for or interested in doing?

Largely Publicly Funded ACORN not being shut down, proves explicitely
what I have alluded to. Barney Frank being still a free man, is further proof.

Neil

[darrels joy]

Has Foreign Money Bolstered Obama?
Posted By John Rosenthal On November 3, 2008 @ 8:24 am In . Feature 01, . Positioning, Elections 2008, US News | No Comments
Has the Obama campaign made a regular practice of accepting illegal foreign campaign contributions, [1] as the research of Kenneth Timmerman suggests?

Well, if one is to judge by an article published last month by the Italian columnist Maria Laura Rodotà, in certain European circles such solicitation would appear to be an open secret. Moreover, Rodotà’s account of being inundated by emails from the Obama campaign suggests that the campaign may not only have been accepting illegal foreign campaign contributions, but that it may have been soliciting them. Here is what Maria Laura Rodotà writes in [2] her October 2 column in the major Italian daily Corriere della Sera [Italian link]:

Oh God. It’s my fault. And your fault. And also the fault of that friend of yours who gave her email to the Obama campaign. They have been writing us for a year, the Obama people — several times a day. They’ve sent us videos of Barack, they’ve responded to criticisms, they’ve laid down the party line, they’ve sold gadgets. They’ve invited us to interesting events like “Camp Obama” in California. … At the foot of each email, they’d ask for small contributions, even just five dollars — which won’t even get you breakfast here in downtown Milan. We never gave a cent. The cheapskates said, “You can’t do that,” they’d be foreign contributions; others sent donations from fake American addresses. Real or fake, live or online, you felt part of a community of like-minded persons, all normal and liberal.

Of course, the campaign’s mailing lists could well include the email addresses of American citizens living abroad or of foreign nationals who — like the “friend of the friend” of Rodotà — signed up without the campaign’s knowledge. But, as with contributions made via the campaign website, it would be up to the campaign to do the necessary vetting to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens and to take the necessary measures to prevent foreign contributions. Astonishingly, [3] Timmerman found that the campaign website had actually turned off standard security features that would have minimized such contributions: for example, by requiring the verification of addresses.

The emphasis in the emails described by Rodotà on small contributions [contributi minimi] is particularly intriguing. [1] As Timmerman has discussed, election finance law does not require the sources of contributions under $200 to be identified. (The donors must be identified, however, if their aggregate donations exceed this amount.) Based on the financial data available as of late September, some $222.7 million in contributions to the Obama campaign — or over half the total amount declared at that time — had come in the form of such “small contributions.” The Obama campaign, unlike the McCain campaign, has not released the names of these “small donors.”

In the meanwhile, [4] Timmerman has calculated that over $6 million in contributions to the Obama campaign from identified sources were made in non-rounded dollar amounts: such as $223.88, $388.67, and $876.09. This odd anomaly suggests that the dollar amounts were converted from foreign currencies. The donors in question gave a total of over $30 million. Timmerman speculates that roughly the same amount of non-itemized contributions from unidentified donors may have come from foreign sources. Of course, if foreign sources were being specifically targeted for “small” contributions, in order to circumvent the disclosure requirements, this could well be a conservative estimate. Timmerman’s calculations, moreover, do not include the Obama campaign’s record haul of $150 million in contributions for September, nor, of course, do they include the as yet unavailable figures for October.


(As I have discussed in [5] an earlier article, at least one major foreign contribution to the Obama campaign was made in plain view: namely, the massive in-kind contribution made by the city of Berlin in hosting the candidate’s famous speech at Berlin’s Victory Column.)

Given months of downright adulation of Obama in so much of the European media — the mirror image of the preceding years of denigration/demonization of George W. Bush in these same media — a large part of Obama’s foreign contributions will surely have come from Europe.

Maria Laura Rodotà’s column is the only example the present author has come across of a European source openly discussing the phenomenon. It would undoubtedly be highly instructive if other Europeans would come forward with their own experiences.

---

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/has-for...lstered-obama/
URLs in this post:
[1] as the research of Kenneth Timmerman suggests: http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/Oba...29/135718.html
[2] her October 2 column in the major Italian daily Corriere della Sera: http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2...81002057.shtml
[3] Timmerman found: http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/oba...21/142761.html
[4] Timmerman has calculated: http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/oba...19/141979.html
[5] an earlier article: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Article.aspx?id=2531