Three Highly Patriotic Scams
Hmm, how do I dip my toes into these waters so gently as to not rile up a certain subset of people and forever doom my own email inbox?
Let’s just say that, at the current moment, American citizens who are overwhelmingly gung-ho patriotic have proven themselves a primo target to be separated from their money. Mostly in service of fattening already bursting coffers that’ll probably be sent through a couple of shell corporations themselves.
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With that in mind, it’s no surprise that the stars and stripes has become an excellent curtain for fraudsters to hide behind, like in these three noxiously nationalistic scams…
Fake PACs
Who’da thunk that the already famously murky world of political action committees, or PACs, would be a feeding ground for scam artists?
How they work, something that I already feel like I’m researching against their direct wishes, is that they serve as a sort of bank account that can take donations, which they then use to support their interests. The use of the word “interests” here is intentionally vague. Even for real PACs, anyone who’s seen their names run at the end of political ads know they tend to lean into patriotic word salad. Broad-chested nonsense like “The Making America Better and Stronger and Eventually Invincible PAC.”
So, scammers just have to choose a name that sounds like someone’s putting the scraps of their social security into the country’s future, like the scam “Law Enforcement for a Safer America PAC” that raised over $14 million.
TrumpCoin
Cryptocurrency and Donald Trump, mixed together and packed into a single, tidy, snake oil bottle? That’s enough to give a fraudster the sort of boner that would rip through raw denim.
So the fact that a TrumpCoin cryptocurrency was created all the way back in 2016, before Trump was elected president, includes almost impressively evil levels of foresight. Unsurprisingly (or maybe not), it turned out they had no actual affiliation with Trump or any of his family members, something that was rapidly indicated and litigated by Eric Trump upon their discovery of the coin.
Now, is this particular cryptocurrency any more of a full-on scam than any other? That’s unclear, but in terms of business reliability, being sued by the Trumps for fraud is not exactly a glowing record.
Fake TrumpBucks That Are “Legal Tender”
The most recent of these — and one I truly have to applaud for its bald-headed levels of insanity — are “TrumpBucks.” These are pretty much what they sound like: commemorative, souvenir currency emblazoned with the face of Donald Trump.
Leave it there and it might not be exactly a reputable product, but it’s hardly a scam. No more than buying some special commemorative coin is, as long as it can’t be confused for legal tender, at which point the government cares about it very much.
That is why you want to make sure the words “COMMEMORATIVE” and the like are displayed prominently. What you really, really can’t do is just straight up print funny money and then promise people that it's legal tender. This is paper money, not a phone case, and customization is heavily frowned upon, if not felonious.
Yes, people really showed up at banks and tried to redeem them. No, they were not able to.
