MAY 2024 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
In this year’s U.S. elections, scammers a playing a larger part than ever before.
Criminal organizations are trying to pass themselves off as legitimate players in the political process in order to profit from voters’ interest in the presidential and congressional elections. For the most part, the scammers are sending text messages, making automated phone calls, and buying online advertisements posing as political fundraisers and political pollsters.
Reacting to a flood of scam messages, many voters are reflexively deleting all political messages and tuning out all political advertisements online.
The consequences are especially worrisome for pollsters, whose century-old strategy of sampling voters by querying randomly selected telephone numbers may now exclude more than half of employed voters under the age of 50. Already harder to reach, these voters tend to be more busy and more aware of the latest trends around online scams, so they have greater reason not to trust anonymous political inquiries on the phone and online.
With large voting blocs not represented in the polls, pollsters may not be very useful in predicting the outcome of elections this year. During the primary season so far, polls have been farther away than usual from election results.
Political fundraising will also take a hit as scammers make off with the largest share ever of intended donations to political groups.
Some of the scammers are registered political groups, but ones that use much of the money they collect for their own benefit and don’t have much impact with what little political messaging they do. Others appear to be international fly-by-night operations that will disappear with whatever money they can collect well before the election takes place.
Text messaging and online advertising campaigns from legitimate political operations are more likely to be reported as suspicious than in past years when they look like the fraudulent messages that voters are seeing. Even the most astute recipients of political messages may struggle to tell the real messages from the fake ones.
Legitimate political organizations can still stand apart by working from their own secure servers and internet domains known to their supporters. They may need to find new ways to show their legitimacy in the messages they put in other places online and send to telephone numbers of voters.
Fish Nation Information Station | Rick Aster’s World | Rick Aster