Transcript of They Were Prolific Donors. They Also Had Dementia.

We're coming up on one week until the presidential election. Let that sink in. One week to go. Take a deep breath if you need. The candidates, of course, are going to be blanketing the key battlegrounds. Canvasers will be going door to door trying to get out the vote, and fundraisers will be looking for every last dollar to get Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump over the line. You've probably been bombarded with some of these text messages or robal calls asking for money. They're annoying as hell, but for most people, they're easy enough to delete or ignore altogether. But tuning out those political calls and solicitations isn't easy for everyone, especially older Americans, whose memories aren't what they used to be, who may be lonely and looking for ways to connect. Think about it. Put yourself in their shoes for a second. How vulnerable would your finances be if the campaigns came calling over and over and over again and didn't stop? My guests are CNN Senior Investigative Correspondent, Kyung Law, and Investigative producer, Yaya Abu-Ghazala. Today, how their team uncovered millions of dollars in donations to Republicans and Democrats taken from elderly dementia patients.

From CNN, This is One Thing. I'm David Ryan. Kyun, Yaya, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having us. It's so It's a pleasure to be here in New York with you.

You guys are here with another CNN investigation. Kyun, where does this one start?

If you think about what your phone looks like during this time of the year, this is when you start getting all of these text messages about, We are X number of days away from the election. You need to donate to save America.

Hey, David, it's Kamala Harris. I need you to chip in $5.

Exactly. All of American democracy depends on that $5. That adds up to millions upon millions of dollars for these campaigns, and it fuels them across the finish line. What we were trying to do is figure out where does all of this money come from? Two of our writers, Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken, just were poking around in the Federal Election Commission website because they had this feeling in their gut, right? Just where is it all coming from? Why am I getting so many text messages? Why are you bombarding me? And then they started seeing names, these names that would drop these small dollar donations, and they kept showing up across the board. So what they wanted to do is figure out who are these people.

So at that point, what we decided to do was take a look at some of the top grassroots donors who've donated hundreds of thousands of dollars who are listed as retired in FEC data, and just try to figure out how do we translate this from these numbers we're seeing in these repeated donations and find out whether these donations were intended. It took a team effort of just picking up the phone, dialing number after number after number, trying to reach a family member, the donor themselves, and basically figure out, Hey, did you donate this much money over the couple of years, did you know you donated this much money? And it became very clear very quickly that oftentimes we were the ones breaking the news to the family. Wow.

Because you guys had a sense that seeing all these repeated numbers from the same people that these weren't conscious donations in the way that somebody might pay for a bill month after month.

Exactly. And I think from those conversations, the way they would very often go, it followed a pretty It's so much a similar template every single time, especially if you reach the son or daughter of a retired elderly person who may or may not have been diagnosed with dementia or shown signs of cognitive decline, and you tell them something like, Hey, we've seen from public FEC records that your father has donated close to $150,000 the last couple of years. Oftentimes, it's a silence and a very quick, Oh, my God, what are you talking about? From there, often they will take a second and say, Hey, I need to get a handle on this. Let me look into this and I'll get back to you. When they'd give us a call back, they It would often be a very devastating realization to the extent of the financial damage that these donations had.

The important thing to note is that these weren't millionaires. These are your parents and your grandparents. Ordinary people, some of them We spoke with a housekeeper. We spoke with somebody who had just an average teaching job. It's extraordinary how it's just regular people who were caught in this trap.

One conversation that sticks out to me is a conversation I had with the wife of an elderly retired donor. When I asked her if she knew how much money her husband had donated to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, her response to me was, Oh, my God, I've never seen that money in my life. I'm afraid the lights are going to go out at home tonight if what you're telling me is true.

Remember, the conversations that Yaha and our investigative team was having with these individual people, they're oftentimes just starting to realize that their loved one has dementia. My mom has dementia. It became clear to me that she had a problem when she wasn't remembering that she had paid a bill or that she had bought a nutritional supplement. Nutritional supplements was my family's problem. You just forget. You lose grasp of the basic structures, and that's a part of your brain that is in decline when you have dementia.

You have these people that are making these repeated donations. You find this out through reporting, calling. Where is the money going to? Is it going to Republicans, Democrats, campaigns themselves? Where's it going?

It's going through two different funnels. We can call it funnels, conduits, right, Yaya? I would say it's conduits. Conduits, right. It's going through these two conduits, and you may recognize the name if you've ever donated to a political campaign before. Wind Red on the Republican side, Act Blue on the Democratic side. If you think about it as a big pipe that all the campaigns go under this one umbrella and it is funneled through this pipe called Wind Red or Act Blue, then that money gets pushed to the campaign. Ultimately, your money does end up with the campaign of your choice or the pack of your choice, but it has to go through this pipe that's called Windred or Act Blue. We found seven times the public complaints on the Windred side versus the Act Blue side. There is a more well-known, persistent, angry problem among donors on the Windred side.

How is this happening? Is it just these people with memory problems mistakenly sending payment after payment, or is there something structural that is allowing this to happen?

It's a combination of things. I think one of the primary reasons this ends up happening is when you sign up to donate, let's say for the first time, and you want to give $10, you put in your email, your phone number, and from there, oftentimes, your contact information gets pushed out to all sorts of campaigns across the country, campaigns, packs. And from there, your phone starts receiving dozens of text messages a day, emails, phone calls. And so every time, if you decide to open one of those links, donate through a survey, oftentimes, there's an option for a pre-checked box. That pre-checked box can be very clear in some instances. In some instances, in other cases, it can be very confusing. I mean, even to us, looking at these ads, I could miss it if I was looking over it. When that box is pre-checked, that essentially authorizes Winred to charge your card on a monthly, oftentimes weekly basis.

But you're saying the box is already checked when you sign up, so that is the default setting that you're going to keep getting charged?

Certain campaigns. Not every campaign does this. Not every The email or text that you get has this.

But it sounds like a big problem for somebody who may have cognitive issues.

Absolutely, especially when if you have dementia. One conversation I had with a donor, it told me that his wife will donate several times a day. Think about how many of those may have been pre-checked recurring. The next day will come. She'll forget that she donated the day before and do it all over again, day after day. So think about That amount of money, those $10, $15, $20, all becoming recurring donations, and how quickly that would snowball into tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you think that $5, $10, or $20 can't pile up, we sat with the family of Richard Benjamin. Let's just start by talking about your father. Richard Benjamin is a veteran. He grew up in Iowa, a farmer, conservative, and he had worked his whole life His wife had recently passed away. Then he was suddenly alone in a lost soul. He was alone during the pandemic, and that's when his children suspect that he was suffering from loneliness as well as cognitive decline. Then in this cycle, in this campaign, the 2024 campaign, he started receiving so many text messages.

Being one of nine siblings, He was always very frugal and very responsible with his money.

The first signal that his kids had that something was awry is this man who had been a very conservative spender. He never donated to political campaigns. He would donate to the Catholic Church and Catholic charities, maybe $15, $20 at a time. He called his kids and said, I need $1,000.

He had never asked me for money in my life, so I knew that was unusual, and I was a little concerned. But I asked him, What's this for?

And they simply didn't understand what's going on. So his daughter opens up his account and was stunned.

And that's when my jaw dropped because I saw hundreds and hundreds of transactions to winred. Com.

And so on this statement here, this is a 10-day period, and I tallied up the number of donations, and there were 1,556 donations in that 10-day period. The total amount was $38,713. And so that's just…

It's just absurd. It doesn't make any sense.

He's never spent $30,000 in a single month in his whole life.

It was extraordinary looking at his bank account and his credit card charges. Those charges amounted to almost $40,000 in one month. Good Lord. In the span of just weeks, he had managed to say goodbye to almost $80,000. He didn't remember. We were the ones telling him we needed to help him because this was a bad, bad situation.

He just had no clue how this impacted him.

When his kids confronted him and showed him the documents and said, Dad, do you remember Do you remember doing this? They would have these conversations with him again and again and again, and he just didn't remember. These are all text messages from somebody, right? Yeah. Do you know who this is? Okay. The Speaker Johnson.

Speaker Johnson, he was a- I tried to go over these accounts with him as well in our interview, and he just didn't remember.

When you're dealing with these elderly donors who might be showing signs of cognitive decline, the nature of the messaging is such that when they receive them constantly in this barrage of texts, they almost feel from many of the conversations that we've had that they are personally in touch with the campaign.

My mother was a very multi-talented woman. She was an artist.

Karen, whose mother passed away, had donated nearly $200,000 left, almost nothing for the children in terms of her life savings.

My mom had written this email to one of the candidates that she was giving money to.

At one point, she wrote a letter. She wrote a letter to some of the campaigns saying, Essentially, I'm sorry that I have nothing left to donate. I have surgery coming up.

She kept saying she was sorry. I'll try to give you the money next time.

Until I get a handle on things I'm going to have to hold off.

She felt like she was letting the campaign down. Right.

She felt bad. This is a woman who had stage 4 cancer, and she was apologizing for not giving them money. What do you want to tell all those candidates you see on that report?

Oh, gosh. I mean, I'm really angry. I want to tell them that this is not the way to go about it, that we need to honor the citizens that are voting for you and the people that believe in you.

And that's what her her daughter described as absolutely disgusting behavior on the part of these campaigns.

What is Windred, Act Blue? What are they doing about it?

Shall we talk about our Windred journey in trying to find them?

We did try to find them. Kyun did try to find them.

We called them. We found their personal cell phone numbers. We e-mailed them. Their call has been forwarded to voicemail.

The person you're trying to reach is not available.

At the time- Did not get a response. Excuse me, ma'am. Hi. We went to their corporate headquarters, listed in Arlington, Virginia. We're looking for Suite 600. Oh, this is Suite 600. And guess what? It is a virtual office. And they have a virtual office here, so they are not located in the building on site. Oh, what does that mean? Meaning that it's like a modern version of the PO box. That there's somebody there to answer the phone, but they don't exist.

For the ways that we tried to reach them, knowing that we sent the texts, we have the right email addresses, you go to the office, and not so much even as a willingness to engage or even get on the phone on background or off the record to get an understanding I think it's just been radio silence.

We did engage with Act Blue. They did call us. We did get a statement where they described this customer care line, where you can reach out, talk to them. There are certain warning words that they hear where they think that, Okay, maybe this donor is in cognitive decline. Let's elevate it to our elevated care team. The thing is, though, you heard Yaya describing this as a conduit, right? That these are conduit companies. They are just the pipe. They say the money is going to the campaigns, and Act Blue, on its part, says, We will try to get your money back, but There's only so much we can do.

This sounds like a broader problem if these conduing companies, like you say, are arguing that once the money is onto them, they funnel it up the chain, and then it's out of their control. Is there anything that the Federal Election Commission is doing about this Wild West of donations?

Well, political speech is protected speech under the First Amendment. The F The FTC, the FTC, they may take your complaints, but ultimately, trying to prove fraud is a very, very high legal bar. There are three attorney generals in three different states trying to sue the conduit companies in order to figure out how to control this behavior. But what we have heard on background from some of these agencies is that it is difficult to prove Fraud is difficult to prove. It's a very, very high bar.

Well, with these pre-checked boxes that are already checked before you even do anything, that sounds just inherently sneaky to me. Is it legal?

Yeah. Currently, Prechecked boxes for recurring donations are allowed in almost every state, despite widespread condemnation from consumer advocates who say it should not be legal.

There is nothing in federal statute that says that it is illegal. Here is the big conundrum. The people who would say this is illegal, it would have to be a measure passed in Congress. The various candidates who need money for their campaigns would be the one saying, Let's make it illegal. How do you think that's going to go?

Well, that's what I was going to ask, because the campaigns, they want as much money to flow in as possible.

Well, the campaigns When we've reached out, how many campaigns have we reached out to? We reach out top five on either side, right? Ten in total? Ten in total. Yeah, they know. I mean, they know, and they also understand that recurring check boxes, recurring payments, check boxes, those are a way for them to have a sustainable level of income from grassroots donors. If they know 40 people are going to donate $5 every single week to the campaign, Then they have a clear amount of money that's going to come in that doesn't rise and fall with the news if it's a single one-time donation. These campaigns want recurring donations.

It gets back to this wider problem of money in politics, something we've been dealing with for years and years and years, but is manifesting here in this little way that is having a ruinous effect on some people's lives.

As part of the reporting process, we requested complaints from AG's offices in this country, and we requested them from the FEC, the FTC, just to read what kinds of complaints people were submitting about Windred and Act Blue. From combing through over a thousand of these public complaints and reviews, we would often read when people are rage-typing, trying to find someone to listen to them saying, Hey, I'm never donating through this platform ever again. Please give me my money back. This can't be allowed to continue. You're seeing in these complaints, oftentimes people are writing that, This is the last dollar you'll see from me. The fear is the downstream effect of this is less and less people will be inclined to donate through these conduits out of fear that they might be next.

The trust is just broken.

Absolutely.

Then what it leads to when it comes to the money and politics question is the millionaires and the billionaires in this country, they're the ones then who will fund our politics, not the grassroots individuals because of the mismanagement of the goodwill of a donor. We're in the height of the political season right now. How has this soured your view of national politics?

Well, they just look like predators with no conscience, period.

Are there tips for people to be on the lookout for this stuff or how to deal with this, whether they're involved in politics or not?

There's one very simple way you can check to see if this situation is happening to your parents or your grandparents. You go to fec. Gov. That is a website that is publicly managed, all of these donations. If they total in all more than 200 more than $200, all you have to do is type their name into the website with the zip code, and it'll pop right up wherever that money has gone. You can isolate it to win red or act blue if you want to do each one, but you can also just put their name in and find out if they've donated more than $200.

That's really helpful.

One thing that we didn't touch on is I talked to in the trying to convince people to talk to us. I talked to a number of families who just wouldn't talk. They wanted to talk and tell us their story, but there's so much shame. Do you feel like they were praying on your father?

I think they had to have been because to look at the amount of donations again, especially in such a short period of time, and not see a problem there, whether it was cognitive decline or just some error, that should alert them. They should know something is wrong. And for them to look past that and just keep sending the text and keep sending the emails, that's taking advantage.

Somebody's already given you so much. Yeah. Even when some of these kids would talk to their parents about it, they'd get back to us and say something like, Look, they are in cognitive decline. I've brought this up to them, and my sense is they're embarrassed and ashamed to admit that they have given so much. The people who did speak to us on the record framed it to us like this. This isn't about shaming our mother or father for the amount of money they've given. It's about shaming and blaming the people who took it from them and asking them to give it back.

We took care of our parents the best way we could, and their intentions were good. They just didn't realize it was going to be manipulated and exploited.

Well, it's fascinating reporting. Thank you both very much.

Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for having us.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Fez Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dizula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manessari, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, Jamie Sandrace, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namerau. Special thanks to Patricia DeCarlo, Wendy Brundage, and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Wednesday. I'll talk to you then.