Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue displayed an “unserious approach to fraud prevention” in the 2024 election, concluded three committees of the U.S. House of Representatives in a report issued Wednesday. The Committee on House Administration, House Judiciary Committee, and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a third interim report on ActBlue’s fraud liability because more evidence of malpractice kept coming to light.

For its part, ActBlue characterizes the entire exercise as a political witch-hunt. “There’s nothing to see here,” the Democratic platform protested too much. “This coordinated campaign against ActBlue isn’t about the facts or legislating. It’s about Republicans’ efforts to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda.”

“After we released findings of a third-party forensic analysis that completely undermined a central claim that they have made against ActBlue, Republicans are refusing to move on,” they continued. “Instead, they are orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign.”

But this narrative stumbles over reporting from none other than The New York Times. During the investigation that produced the first two interim committee reports, “ActBlue assured the Committees that it had produced all information relevant to the Committees’ inquiry,” the latest version said. “However, on April 2, 2026, the New York Times published an article about ActBlue’s fraud-prevention practices, which contained facts and cited documents that ActBlue had not produced to the Committees.

“Among other details, the Times quoted from two documents — an employee resignation letter and internal company messages — revealing fraud and whistleblower retaliation at ActBlue,” the report specified. Fraud and whistleblower retaliation certainly sounds like relevant topics for Congressional oversight.

The narrative also stumbles over its own inconsistency with ActBlue’s testimony before Congress, where multiple leaders have chosen to plead the Fifth.

The third interim report makes three major findings:

• “ActBlue’s policies that allegedly ‘prevent’ illegal, fraudulent political contributions could be bypassed easily by foreign actors.
• “ActBlue’s ‘passport verification process,’ which allegedly prevents illegal foreign donations, is an ineffective security method that does not actually require a valid U.S. passport number.
• “ActBlue repeatedly instructed its fraud prevention analysts to ‘give the donor the benefit of the doubt’ and to ignore red flags about contributions with foreign indicators.”

ActBlue’s fraud prevention shortcomings included not requiring users to enter a card verification value (CVV) when donating by credit card, as well as reducing the amount of reviewed transactions. “ActBlue previously insisted that requiring a card verification value (CVV) for recurring online political donations is unnecessary to prevent fraudulent donations and hinders the platform’s contribution rate,” the report stated. The company claimed that “adding additional fields to a contribution form decreases conversion rates, and suppresses contributions, while not adding any security.”

Of course, anyone paying with a credit card also has their CVV easily at hand on the reverse side; only a scammer could lack this information — which is why credit cards have a CVV security feature in the first place. The claim that a basic security feature adds no security but does reduce participation sounds remarkably parallel to the arguments made against photo ID requirements for voting. In both instances, the only conceivable reason to oppose either security measure is to leave the door open to fraud.

By November 2023, ActBlue claimed that it used CVV “on many transactions across the site,” and the report concludes that “ActBlue began requiring a CVV for most transactions” in January 2024. So much for the company’s objection that a CVV was unnecessary.

However, by April 2024, “ActBlue weakened its fraud-prevention standards twice in 2024 to take ‘a more lenient approach’ to fraud prevention by triggering fewer manual reviews,” the report continued. “In July 2024, ActBlue confirmed that its recent policy changes allowed more fraud than the January 2024 CVV requirement prevented.”

Still, ActBlue made light of the vulnerabilities by claiming that “there is no evidence that foreign donations through online or small-dollar contributions are a problem in U.S. elections.” Funny how that works; they deliberately refused to look for something, then claimed that they failed to find it.

In fact, for donors with foreign addresses, the report found that ActBlue conducted no passport verification at all. “ActBlue claimed that the platform ‘validates’ passport numbers to ensure that non-U.S. citizens or foreign donors cannot provide political contributions through the platform,” it stated. “However, internal documents reveal that ActBlue’s ‘passport verification’ feature is essentially toothless — it only ensures that the entered passport number contains a certain number of characters, not that it is a valid U.S. passport number. The provided documents expose that ActBlue does ‘not verify the [passport number] information in any other way . . . [or] check the information provided against a government database.’”

To make matters worse, ActBlue trained its staff to “give the donor the benefit of the doubt,” the report continued. In practice, this meant approving donations with multiple red flags — if the company could find any rationale for doing so. “Internal trainings directed ActBlue’s fraud prevention team to ‘look for reasons to accept contributions’ rather than to examine them closely for indicators of fraud — as required by federal regulation.”

“Oftentimes, ActBlue employees were instructed to accept a donation that they had previously rejected for signs of an illegal foreign contribution,” the report observed. “One ActBlue employee noted that a donor who ‘has a few red flags, such as IP/billing mismatch and a concerning IP provider name, a foreign credit card, an odd email domain, and [is] connected to other rejected users via browser fingerprint,’ should be accepted because ActBlue ‘can’t say for sure that this is fraud.’”

Given this approach, perhaps it is most surprising that ActBlue detected any fraud at all. Yet the report noted that ActBlue “had detected at least 22 significant fraud campaigns on the platform in recent years, including several from foreign sources.” Such data did not deter ActBlue from a “lax approach to fraud prevention.”

The congressional report also noted with concern that a mass exodus of ActBlue fraud compliance staff following the 2024 election seemed to accompany whistleblower retaliation. “In April 2026, the Committees published a second interim report, following reports that at least seven senior staff members, including ActBlue’s ‘highest-ranking legal officer,’ resigned from or were fired by the platform in the months following the 2024 election,” the report stated.

“According to reporting by the New York Times, the last remaining lawyer on ActBlue’s legal team, Zain Ahmad, went ‘on leave’ and had his access to internal systems revoked in late February 2025,” it continued. “Ahmad reportedly claimed that he had been retaliated against by ActBlue staff for blowing the whistle on internal misconduct.”

In response to the media stories, the committees issued further subpoenas against an uncooperative ActBlue. Those documents “show the collapse of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team,” the report described. “By March 2025, every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team resigned, was fired, or went on extended leave from the platform. … Every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team appears to have left the platform after the 2024 election because of its ‘knowing and willful’ acceptance of illegal foreign contributions, and the subsequent cover-up.”

This “‘knowing and willful’ acceptance of illegal foreign political donations and subsequent cover-up” by ActBlue, “as well as its lenient approach to preventing fraudulent donations, are of great concern to the Committees,” they wrote. “It is unlawful ‘to solicit, accept, or receive a [political] contribution or donation’ from ‘a foreign national.’ Federal law also prohibits making ‘any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation’ to Congress. ActBlue and [CEO Regina] Wallace-Jones appear to have done both.”