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**bsteadman** · 10-09-2012, 09:22 PM

FEC on Obama.com Possible Foreign Donations: "No Comment"

WILL THERE BE AN INVESTIGATION, OR WILL OBAMA GET A PASS AGAIN?

The Post & Email
Sharon Rondeau
10/8/2012

View the complete article at:

http://www.thepostemail.com/2012/10/...ns-no-comment/

**bsteadman** · 10-09-2012, 09:49 PM

SECRET SERVICE MUST INVESTIGATE OBAMA CREDIT CARD FRAUD

News With Views
J.B. Williams
10/9/2012

Excerpt:

"The Obama campaign is reporting that it raised a record $181 million in the month of September alone. According to campaign FEC filings for September, the money came from 1.8 million individual donors, many overseas, and over 500,000 of whom had never donated before.

Did YOU donate to Obama? You might have, just follow the trail… The same thing happened in September of 2008. We later learned that most of that huge cash infusion came from foreign countries, in small denominations, just like September 2012, averaging $53 each from millions of undisclosed donors, most of them abroad.

There are Federal Laws making it “illegal” to accept “foreign campaign contributions,” yet Obama just took in almost $200 million, most of it from overseas donors. The FEC must immediately investigate the source of these overseas funds.

The neat part is who those “first time donors” are… it is YOU. And it is YOU who must demand that the FEC and Secret Service immediately investigate the massive overseas funds pouring into the Obama campaign.

The Government Accountability Institute just issued a 109 page report detailing the massive campaign finance fraud taking place in the 2012 campaign.

From the report –

“Campaigns are not required to disclose donations from individuals who gave less than $200 in a campaign cycle unless the campaign is audited. Furthermore, campaigns do not even need to keep records of those who gave less than $50. Presidential candidates are raising large amounts of money that fall under the $200 threshold and audits are rare unless a campaign accepts federal matching funds. To this date (September 26, 2012), the Romney campaign has raised $58,456,968 and the Obama campaign has raised $271,327,755 in contributions under $200 for the 2012 campaign cycle. In the 2008 presidential elections, the Obama campaign raised $335,139,233 in donations under $200.”

A glimpse at campaign finance security –

Given the state-of-the art digital sophistication of the President’s re-election campaign—including social media, micro-targeting and data-mining—its online donation system contains at least three major security vulnerabilities:

The absence of the industry-standard CVV and unknown use of AVS anti-fraud security for online credit card donations

The presence of a branded, major third party-owned website (Obama.com) redirects its 68% foreign traffic to a campaign donation page

Active foreign solicitation using indiscriminate email solicitations and exposure to social media

Specifically: Obama Campaign Lacks the Industry-Standard Level Of Credit Card Security For Donations, But Uses It For Merchandise Purchases: To purchase Obama campaign merchandise, the campaign requires buyers to enter their credit card CVV security code, but does not require the credit card security code to be entered when making an online campaign donation (see page 61). By GAI’s estimates, the Obama campaign’s failure to utilize industry-standard protections potentially costs the campaign millions in extra processing fees. (with purpose)

The BIG Picture is Massive Fraud

There are reasons why the Obama campaign would use CVV code security technology for merchandising. In short, the CVV code on the back of your credit or debit card is there to ensure that the individual using the card is you, or someone authorized by you to use the card.

Most Credit Card fraud does not happen with a stolen card, but rather a stolen card number. Because the fraudster does not actually possess the card, but only the card number and expiration date for the card, they will not have the CVV code on the back of the card in most cases.

When the campaign is selling and shipping merchandise, they use CVV code technology to secure each transaction before shipping merchandise.

But when nothing is being shipped, as in the case of campaign donations, they have CVV code technology turned off. Why? Because, the transactions coming from overseas on stolen card numbers, will not have the CVV code. They also won’t have AVS information, which the Obama campaign also turned off on its donations account. They are stolen card numbers, most of them from Americans.

Address Verification, (AVS) like CVV code verification, are industry standards for blocking fraudulent online transactions. Why has the Obama campaign turned off both of those security functions for donations, but not for merchandise orders?

With these security functions turned on, the system would DECLINE transactions as “fraudulent” if they were missing a matching CVV code. So, to allow “fraudulent” donations on stolen card numbers, they would have to turn off the CVV security function, thereby allowing the “fraudulent” transactions to APPROVE without any CVV code match.

This raises three obvious questions?

Who are these individual donors? (Including via bundlers?)

Why are we allowing foreign donations from overseas?

How many of those donations are made on stolen U.S. card numbers?

Only a full scale investigation into the massive donations from September 2012 (and 2008) can answer these and other questions. However, what we already know is this…

Obama is not supposed to accept any foreign campaign donations, but he is.

The Obama campaign is familiar with and using CVV code technology on merchandise, but not on campaign donations.

Without the CVV code, fraudulent donations can be made with stolen card numbers and they are.

The CVV code technology was intentionally turned off for Obama donations only.

The Secret Service is responsible for investigating and prosecuting Credit Card Fraud.

The Secret Service must immediately investigate the huge sums pouring into the Obama campaign from overseas donors, looking closely at the campaigns misuse of CVV code technology to open the flood gates for fraudulent transactions."
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View the complete article at:

http://www.newswithviews.com/JBWilliams/williams214.htm

**bsteadman** · 10-10-2012, 01:54 AM

The Illegal-Donor Loophole

The Daily Beast
Peter Schweizer , Peter J. Boyer
10/8/2012

Excerpt:

"There has been no shortage of media attention paid to the role of money in the current presidential contest. Super PACs, bundlers, 527s, and mega-donors have attracted abundant notice. But there has been surprisingly little focus on perhaps the most secretive and influential financial force in politics today: the wide-open coffers of the Internet.

With millions of online campaign donations ricocheting through cyberspace, one might think the Federal Election Commission would have erected serious walls to guard federal elections from foreign or fraudulent Internet contributions. But that’s far from true. In fact, campaigns are largely expected to police these matters themselves.

There’s certainly ample historical reason to worry about foreign donations: in the 1990s, for instance, there were allegations that Chinese officials had funneled money into U.S. campaigns.

The solicitation of campaign donations from foreign nationals is prohibited by the Federal Election Campaign Act. But that law, passed in the 1970s, did not anticipate the Internet, or the creative uses that can be made of such social media as Facebook.

Campaigns that aggressively raise money online are soliciting donations from people around the world—whether they intend to or not. People repost campaign solicitations on blogs that send them sprawling around the globe like digital kudzu. For example, an Obama campaign official posting ended up on Arabic Facebook, complete with a hyperlink to a donation page. In another instance, someone posted videos on Latin American websites featuring Sen. Marco Rubio, and included embedded advertisements asking for campaign donations.

In addition, people around the world are being asked for donations by the campaigns themselves, simply because they signed up for information on campaign websites. The problem: candidate webpages don’t ask visitors from foreign IP addresses to enter a military ID or passport number. Instead, the websites use auto-responder email systems that simply gather up email addresses and automatically spit out solicitations.

The FEC, meanwhile, has taken the position that this sort of passive internet solicitation is not illegal, because the campaigns, presumably, are not intentionally targeting foreign nationals with their online money pleas.

Further complicating the issue are websites like Obama.com—which is owned not by the Obama campaign but by Robert Roche, an American businessman and Obama fundraiser who lives in Shanghai. Roche’s China-based media company, Acorn International, runs infomercials on Chinese state television. Obama.com redirects to a specific donation page on BarackObama.com, the official campaign website. Unlike BarackObama.com, Obama.com’s traffic is 68 percent foreign, according to markosweb.com, a traffic-analysis website. According to France-based web analytics site Mustat.com, Obama.com receives over 2,000 visitors every day.

The name Robert W. Roche appears 11 times in the White House visitors log during the Obama administration. Roche also sits on the Obama administration’s Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations, and is a co-chair of Technology for Obama, a fundraising effort. (In an email exchange, Roche declined to discuss his website, or his support for the Obama reelection effort, referring the inquiries to the Obama campaign team. The Obama campaign, in turn, says it has no control over Roche’s website; it also says only 2 percent of the donations associated with Obama.com come from overseas.)

But it isn’t just foreign donations that are a concern. So are fraudulent donations. In the age of digital contributions, fraudsters can deploy so-called robo-donations, computer programs that use false names to spew hundreds of donations a day in small increments, in order to evade reporting requirements. According to an October 2008 Washington Post article, Mary Biskup of Missouri appeared to give more than $170,000 in small donations to the 2008 Obama campaign. Yet Biskup said she never gave any money to the campaign. Some other contributor gave the donations using her name, without her knowledge. (The Obama campaign explained to the Post that it caught the donations and returned them.)

This makes it all the more surprising that the Obama campaign does not use a standard security tool, the card verification value (CVV) system—the three- or four-digit number often imprinted on the back of a credit card, whose purpose is to verify that the person executing the purchase (or, in this case, donation) physically possesses the card. The Romney campaign, by contrast, does use the CVV—as has almost every other candidate who has run for president in recent years, from Hillary Clinton in 2008 to Ron Paul this year. (The Obama campaign says it doesn’t use the CVV because it can be an inhibiting factor for some small donors.) Interestingly, the Obama campaign’s online store requires the CVV to purchase items like hats or hoodies (the campaign points out that its merchandise vendor requires the tool).

We also focused on the Obama campaign because it is far more successful than Romney when it comes to small donors—which the Internet greatly helps to facilitate. In September the Obama campaign brought in its biggest fundraising haul—$181 million. Nearly all of that amount (98 percent) came from small donations, through 1.8 million transactions. - (bold emphasis added in the preceding three paragraphs)
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View the complete article at:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-loophole.html

**AMERICAN ADVOCATE** · 10-10-2012, 03:00 PM

This is a repeat of the same fraud and illegal donations history that occurred for the 2008 campaign .
Many millions of dollars were donated by arab countries , but nobody did anything about it then either .
This lousy stinking bastard and his ' handlers ' have proven that crime , swindling , lying and cheating actually do pay .

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Bombshell: Obama.com Owned by Bundler in Shanghai with Business Ties to Chinese Gov.

Bombshell: Obama.com Owned by Bundler in Shanghai with Business Ties to Chinese Gov.

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