Before the recent election, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability asked then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to turn over all Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) relating to ActBlue — not much happened. An SAR is a document that banks file with the Treasury Department pursuant to potentially fraudulent or illicit financial activity. Yellen stalled, presumably in the hope that the Democrats would win the House back in November and halt the investigation. That obviously didn’t happen and the new Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, is of course cooperating with the committee.

This may well be what precipitated the sudden departure of seven senior officials from ActBlue in February. The New York Times reports that the exodus included “the associate general counsel — who was the highest-ranking legal officer at ActBlue — the assistant research director, a human resources official, the chief revenue officer and an engineer who had spent 16 years building and maintaining the electronic pipes through which the group’s donations flow.” These “electronic pipes” are clearly of particular interest to the Chairman of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who included the following forewarning in his letter to erstwhile Treasury Secretary Yellen:

Recent reports have raised the specter of fraud and evasion of campaign finance law by individuals exploiting online contribution platforms, especially ActBlue. For example, ActBlue had not implemented standard procedures to guard against identity theft and fraud such as requiring a Card Verification Value (CVV) to process online transactions until it received criticism for not doing so. ActBlue is also being investigated by several states’ officials in relation to contributions allegedly made via the platform fraudulently without the reported contributor’s awareness.

This practice is known as “smurfing.” It is a type of identity theft whereby the names of small dollar donors are repeatedly used without their knowledge to mask large dollar political contributions that by law must be reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The website, Election Watch, features a “Smurf Search” tool that allows users to search FEC data for implausibly large numbers of political contributions attributed to individual donors. An examination of the data, for example, indicates that a single Colorado resident allegedly made 57,138 contributions — one transaction every 1.3 days — totaling no less than $234,441.