FORT COLLINS — A Larimer County woman has found herself part of a nationwide investigation into an alleged “smurfing” campaign by ActBlue, an online fundraising platform for Democrat candidates, progressive organizations and nonprofits.
In a report by the American Spectator, Sonia Immasche, of Fort Collins is shown to have donated $234,441 over a period of six years and two months in 57,138 separate ActBlue contributions under five different versions of her name, averaging out to $4.10 per donation.
“Smurfing” is a form of identity theft that uses the names of legitimate political donors to report numerous small donations repeatedly without their knowledge in order to hide larger donations that exceed legal limits or from donors who do not want their name on campaign finance reports.
By law all political contributions must be reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Complete Colorado reached out to Immasche to determine if she had in fact made the more than 57,000 separate ActBlue donations, but had not heard back by press time. We will update this story should she make contact.
Immasche’s public Facebook posts indicate she is politically active, having organized several fundraisers for progressive ideals.
A search for Immasche on the Colorado Tracer platform, which tracks Colorado political donations, shows that since 1998, she has given about $15,500 over 854 different donations. A second search for Immasche on the FEC site showed more than 101,000 donations, including all the ActBlue donations as well as donations she made directly to individuals or organizations dating back to 2007.
According to the Spectator, before the election in November, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability requested a copy of all Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) related to ActBlue from the US Treasury Department, but nothing came of it.
Right after the election, when Democrats lost both the White House and Congress, there was a “sudden departure of seven senior officials from ActBlue in February,” the Spectator notes, citing a New York Times report saying 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 platform’s (collection mechanism).”
The spectator report says there are thousands of examples across the country, similar to Immasche’s, leading to 19 state attorneys general opening investigations into the practices of ActBlue.
A target letter from the South Carolina attorney general to ActBlue, for example, calls the sheer number of donations made by some contributors “implausible and highly suspicious.”
“ActBlue has raised about $16 billion for the Democratic Party and other far left organizations since it was founded in 2004,” the report says. “According to Open Secrets, it raised more than $3.8 billion during the recent election cycle, well over $3.7 billion of which allegedly arrived in the form of “small dollar” donations.”
