A penny stock promotions outfit with ties to erstwhile White House chief strategist Steve Bannon appears to have been behind a flood of text messages “Calling All Patriots” to descend on Washington, D.C, on Jan. 6, when a MAGA mob stormed the Capitol.
The app RoboKiller, which identifies and blocks dubious cell phone communications (and which is owned by IAC, this publication’s parent company), shared estimates with The Daily Beast that as many as 400,000 people may have received the messages. The texts urged people to protest the counting of electoral votes, which were set to be certified in Congress that day, though they did not call for the violence that erupted that afternoon.
Still, in the days before the mob raided the seat of American democracy, stole federal property, and killed a police officer, hundreds complained to RoboKiller about the unsolicited messages they received from dozens of burner phone numbers.
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Others just took to Twitter.
Anyone who texted “Help” back to these numbers would have been told that they had signed up for notifications from a company called Digi Messaging & Advertising. The public record on this company yields few details: an anonymizing service incorporated it in notoriously opaque Wyoming in 2019, and the state dissolved it in October 2020 for tax delinquency.
It is impossible to tell whether or to what extent these messages influenced the right-wing riot in Washington, D.C. that claimed five lives, sought to disrupt the transfer of power from President Donald Trump, and spawned dozens of subsequent arrests and federal charges. What is known is that Bannon pushed the so-called “Stop the Steal” cause, falsely claiming the election was rife with fraud and vote theft, on his War Room: Pandemic podcast—and that the president is said to have renewed his connection with Bannon in the weeks leading up to the attack.
And an investigation into Digi Messaging and Advertising and its network of websites, including DigiMsg and DigiPush.io, turns up multiple ties to Bannon—and his past as a penny-stock operator.
An analysis of Javascript language on DigiPush.io shows it was programmed, defectively, to launch promotional pop-up ads for Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic site, for the Bannon-linked page Populist.Press, and for We Build the Wall. The latter is the nonprofit that federal prosecutors accused Bannon of raiding for funds last August; he has pleaded not guilty in the case.
DigiPush.io shares a Facebook Pixel ID—an exclusive code companies use to track ad conversions on the social media site—not only with WarRoom.org and WeBuildtheWall.us but with CTTInvestor.com. That’s the now-defunct website of Currency Tracking Technologies, a start-up belonging to Bannon collaborator and co-defendant Brian Kolfage.
Tech experts voiced surprise at the choice of Digi Messaging as a promotions and push notification vendor, given its apparently tiny clientele, low-budget design, and the relative difficulty of searching for its pages online.
“They’re not a high-profile, obvious company that you could easily find,” remarked Eric Nelson, CEO of SlickRockWeb, a search-engine optimization and marketing firm.
But there are clues as to who is behind Digi Messaging, and how the company might have wound up working for Bannon and those tied to him.
DigiMsg.com shares an IP address with SWAlert.com, and in the past has shared an SSL certificate with SWAlertReport.com. Those are both websites for Stock Watch Alert, a service of the Stock Communications Group. That, in turn, is another Wyoming-organized company that utilized the same incorporation service as Digi Messaging—but is registered to a Houston-based stock promoter named Charles Bingham.
A decade ago, Bingham ran afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for allegedly running a pump-and-dump scheme with two of Bannon’s former penny stock venture partners: attorneys Todd Van Siclen and David Otto. The trio settled the charges and accepted penalties without admitting wrongdoing.
Stock Watch Alert is also one of the small handful of firms for which DigiPush.io generated pop-up ads. Another is KBLBInvestors.com, a penny-stock site that also uses DigiPush.io’s Facebook Pixel code—and which has a consulting contract with Optimo Holdings, another of Bingham’s Wyoming-incorporated entities, for “investor relations, media purchasing and news coverage and website traffic to our investor portal.”
KBLBInvestors.com also notes the company has an agreement with Hansel Capital, a firm belonging to Ben Hansel, one of Bingham’s business associates. As it happens, Hansel has his own Wyoming-founded firm, which also used the same incorporating service as Digi Messaging, Stock Communications Group, and Optimo: 24/7 Market News.
Its website, 247MarketNews.com, which promotes KBLB and other Hansel-linked penny stock firms, also had pop-up ads created through DigiPush.io and shares DigiPush’s Facebook Pixel ID. Another Hansel-controlled site, Access-WallStreet.com, shared an SSL certificate with DigiMsg.com as recently as last June.
Further, an inactive Reddit account with the handle DigiMsg uses the name XeriInvestors. XeriInvestors.com is yet another penny stock investment site with DigiPush.io ads and a contract with Hansel. Besides being promoted on 247MarketNews.com, its privacy policy is a word-for-word lift from that site, beginning with the line “This website www.247marketnews.com (‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’) official website (the ‘website’ or ‘site’), is owned and managed by 247 Market News (‘247’) and operated as ‘247MarketNews.com.’”
Finally, 247MarketNews.com, KBLBInvestors.com, and WarRoom.org, along with the Bannon-tied VMAG.org and the defunct Stock Communications Group site EnviroTechStock.com, have all in the past used the same Adroll Tag for tracking visitors. This would indicate that the penny stock pages and those linked to the one-time Trump strategist shared access to the same Adroll account.
"You have three or four coincidences, it's hard to say that just randomly occurred,” remarked Nelson, the SEO and SEM executive.
Neither Bingham nor Bannon responded to requests for comment.
Hansel, however, fiercely denied any connection to Bannon or to the flurry of spam messages that landed on people’s phones, urging them to mass in D.C. He also insisted Digi Messaging was a third-party vendor, rather than a company he controlled, although he declined to divulge details about who owned it or how he came to work with it, or to answer questions about the links between its website, his, and the Bannon network.
“I have no relationship with Steve Bannon. I have never met him, worked with, endorsed, or spoken with him,” Hansel wrote in an email. “My political beliefs are very straightforward, I always choose more freedom over unconstitutional restrictions, which means that I am not on the Trump Train, the Steve Stagecoach, or the Beast Bus. I'm not involved with politics in any way.”
As it happens, Hansel is behind another page DigiPush.io works with, and which shares the AdRoll tag with the Bannon sites: AmericansDeserveBetter.org, a political action committee Hansel founded last year to battle the Green New Deal and left-wing measures on immigration. The penny stock promoter, who also made several critical comments about Trump’s post-election comportment, noted that the PAC never raised any money, and its social media accounts are largely barren.
—with additional reporting by Adam Rawnsley
