Uncle Scam Wants You … to cough up your cash and personal data, FBI warns ahead of midterms

The FBI is once again warning US citizens to be on the lookout for the scams that are so often rife around election season.

With November’s midterms fast approaching, the FBI said scammers are known to use the names, imagery, and slogans of high-profile candidates for a range of frauds.

These are often related to making donations and selling merchandise, but can also be geared toward stealing personal data for use in follow-on scams.

And of course, more recently, fraudsters’ efforts can be all the more convincing given the rise in AI use and deepfake technology, which can also be used to more accurately imitate the likenesses of candidates and other officials.

Campaign investment pool schemes are among the four big frauds the FBI wants the public to watch out for over the next few weeks.

These involve scammers convincing their marks to pay into a campaign pool, which ostensibly pays out to all of those who donated after the candidate wins.

More commonly, these types of pooled investment scams are based on collective investments into stocks and other appreciating assets.

The FBI did not provide details about these campaign pools’ investment incentives or how victims are supposedly able to increase their stake by donating to the cause, but did say that no genuine campaign donations appreciate over time.

Another common donation-based scam to be wary of is the one that convinces victims to fund a fake political action committee (PAC), one that collects supporters’ cash and promises to hand it to their favored party or candidate.

Instead of forwarding money to a specific political campaign, however, the scammers pocket it all for themselves.

Fraudsters are also known for claiming to sell merchandise related to political campaigns – orders that ultimately go unfulfilled.

These constitute non-delivery scams, which rank in the top five genres of internet cons, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center’s (IC3) most recent annual report.

The same report put phishing at the number one spot in that same list, and the classic cyberattack features on the FBI’s list of midterm-related scams, too.

Creating a sense of urgency, scammers will text victims claiming they have not yet registered to vote, and asking them to follow a link to a webpage where they can enter their details and complete the process, which of course leads to identity theft.