Election Season Scams

During a presidential election season, many people start getting a lot of text messages from political parties and candidates. Scammers are taking advantage of political passion by tricking people into handing over their personal information.

Most of these messages are sent by campaigns to party organizers to rally support from registered voters in their area, but some of these messages could be scammers trying to trick people into giving them money under the guise of a donation.

Generally, you shouldn’t trust anything that shows up unsolicited, even if you think it might be safe. Right off the bat, you should know to never respond to any text that randomly comes to your phone.

The three most common election season scams are political donation scams, fake surveys/polls and voter registration scams.

In the text, you can see it wants users to take a poll by clicking a link. Political survey scams will often ask for fake polling. Clicking on a link could bring you to a page offering prizes for participating, but then they require users to enter their credit card information to cover the shipping for the prize. That’s a glaring red flag that should make everyone stop. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true (like a free gift for a survey), it probably is.

If it’s an unsolicited text, don’t respond.  You can reach out to your local election offices. Look at the phone number. You can also reach out to the Better Business Bureau who can try and help at https://www.bbb.org//

The best thing to do? Don’t click and don’t respond.