

THEY COUNTED THE DIGITS: ActBlue's Passport Check
Episode notes
ActBlue said it verified passport numbers on foreign donations. A new House report prints what verification meant, in ActBlue's own words. Three House committees, Judiciary, Administration and Oversight, released "Fraud on ActBlue, Part III," and unlike the first two it publishes the platform's internal messages: Slack traffic and supervisor notes. On the passport check, quoted in the report: "very basic validation, number of characters, to ensure that the number entered is a valid passport number ... but we do not verify the information in any other way." If you typed the right number of digits, that was a verified passport. Supervisors told fraud analysts to "give the donor the benefit of the doubt." One analyst, on a donation where every sign pointed to Canada and the billing address said Missouri: "Twitter seems to confirm that they are a rea ...