Posted on 10/25/2008 8:16:41 PM PDT by ms8888
Turning off Address Verification on donations is a huge national security risk. The Obama campaign intentionally opened themselves up to fraud. If Obama is this irresponsible in his donations, how will he act in office and treat taxpayer money? (answer: irresponsibly)
There is excessive exposure to security threats with this irresponsible action. If you look at barackobama.com's Alexa traffic details, 0.6% traffic comes from Nigeria. That doesn't sound too much, but its the 6th highest for a country, above China, Japan, France, Spain, and probably amounts to 60K users per month (overall the site has 8M per month in US). Nigeria, as many people know, is one of the largest sources of scams and credit card frauds and is ranked as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. $630K already was seized in Nigeria meant for Obama contributions (BBC article).
I'm not claiming any specific wrongdoing, but this opens up to a huge potential for one. It is definitely plausible that a scam is occuring. Without address verification, a foreign donor can put any address in the USA AND then donate multiple times by putting different addresses. People ask who would have time, I would say people in countries like Nigeria and India (#5) where labor is cheap.
We need to demand the Obama campaign provide transparency like website statistics for donate.barackobama.com. Because they intentionally opened themselves up to fraud, they must provide the transparency that demonstrates minimal fraud occurred.
I am thoroughly disgusted with this blatant disregard of security measures.
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