For the hundreds of thousands of Facebook users who have been targeted by ads from the Keep America Great Committee, the group probably appears to be just another pro-Trump super PAC. Indeed, its ads, and the donation pages to which they link, look like they are from the Trump campaign itself.
That’s because the vast majority of them are from the Trump campaign. The Keep America Great Committee has run hundreds of paid Facebook posts via two pages on the platform, and most are verbatim copies of ads run by Trump’s re-election team. Many ads even use the same first-person pronouns, referring to “my” presidential campaign and “our” efforts to defeat Joe Biden.
KAGC did change one key part of the ads, though: Instead of directing people to the Trump campaign’s online donation page, it directed them to its own. And that page also looks identical to the Trump campaign’s, because it largely is. The website’s source code shows that KAGC used a free, open-source program to copy the Trump campaign’s donation page on the GOP fundraising platform WinRed, swapping out its own bank account info for the Trump campaign’s and adding a line at the bottom saying all donations would benefit KAGC.
ADVERTISEMENT
In effect, the group is co-opting Trump campaign ads and websites to raise money for itself. The president’s wide grassroots appeal has inspired many dubious internet entrepreneurs to try to entice well-meaning donors into handing over some of their money, and Trump’s campaign has been more proactive than most in disavowing groups that it feels are improperly trading on its name. But even by the standards of get-rich-quick political fundraising schemes in the Trump era, KAGC’s effort is remarkably brazen.
“This group is copying and pasting official ads, expressly—and likely fraudulently—claiming that the president is urging donations to the group, and even using official campaign logos,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reforms at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit ethics group. “Scam PACs have managed to get away with a lot in recent years but this appears to cross a line.”
Neither KAGC nor its proprietor, a Nevada man named Kyle Bell, responded to detailed questions about the group’s operations.
Bell and his wife, KAGC’s treasurer, set up the super PAC in January. More than five months later, it has yet to report any information on its finances to the Federal Election Commission, despite receiving a letter from the commission last month probing its failure to file a report on its income and expenditures during the first quarter of the year.
That makes it impossible to know how much money the group has raked in from its Facebook ad campaign. According to Facebook records, though, KAGC has spent about $25,000 on ads on the platform since early February. The ads initially ran on a page called Keep America Great Committee. That page is now inactive, and since May its ads have run on a separate one: Keep America Great 2020.
Some of the group’s ads attempted to lure donors with calls to support first responders and essential workers combatting the coronavirus pandemic (the money went toward KAGC, and there’s no indication any was passed on to frontline COVID-19 personnel). But most of the ads are identical to ones run by the Trump campaign and, in a few cases, the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Each of those KAGC ads directs those who click to the group’s homepage, which is simply a donation page. The page features the Trump campaign logo prominently but says it was “Paid for by Keep America Great Committee. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.”
The KAGC homepage is still soliciting contributions for a supposed effort to combat the campaign to impeach the president, which ended in acquittal in February. The outdated appeal corresponds to the date on which its source code indicates KAGC largely copied the contents of Trump’s online donation portal. A line in that code says the website was “mirrored” from Trump’s WinRed page on Jan. 20, 2020, about two weeks after KAGC was formed.
Large chunks of that source code are identical to that of the Trump campaign’s WinRed page. But there are some notable differences: KAGC inserted its own account information for its online payment processor. It also added Facebook and Google tracking codes that allow it to keep tabs on visitors to the site.
Bell appears to have extensive experience in online marketing, and a lengthy history of customers who say they were swindled out of thousands of dollars by his promises to make them successful internet entrepreneurs.
Sajid Bashir, a U.K. financial-services accountant, told PAY DIRT that Bell and a business partner named Jon Tarr extracted $50,000 from him and a friend after promising to help them build an online advertising business. The website Bell and Tarr built for them, designed to use online ads to monetize blog content, never worked as promised, Bashir said.
“We lost $50k, tried to reason with [Bell], asked for further assistance just to recoup our money,” Bashir says, but then Bell stopped responding to him and later changed his contact information. “I believe these two men are poison, [and] should be in jail to keep them away from hard-working people’s money,” Bashir said.
That appears to be a sentiment shared to some degree by others with whom Bell and Tarr have done business. Testimonials about them on the website Ripoff Report describe another of their business ventures—a program that charged people thousands of dollars to train them to make money through Facebook marketing—as overhyped at best.
“I am not sure if this has reached a level that I would call a ‘scam’ but I would certainly label this as a good idea gone bad,” one anonymous participant wrote on the site.
In replies to posts on those Ripoff Report pages, Tarr denied all allegations that he and Bell had misled participants or failed to deliver on their promises. But some participants were apparently so upset by their experiences that they set up stand-alone websites devoted to each of the men: jontarrscam.com and kylebellscam.com. (Neither website remains active, though an archived version of the one devoted to Tarr is still accessible.)
Bell’s foray into politics as a revenue-generating enterprise has other red flags beyond its imitation of other political committees. The terms of service page on KAGC’s website says the site is “owned or controlled” by a company called KAGC Technical Services LLC, which it indicates is incorporated in Delaware. But no company by that name exists in Delaware, according to state corporate regulators, and PAY DIRT couldn’t find records of the firm anywhere else.
KAGC’s website also encourages donors to sign up for recurring contributions, whereby the same sum is deducted from donors’ bank accounts each month. The website’s terms of service advise people who wish to cancel those recurring donations to send an email to supportcenter@kagc.com.
But that domain, kagc.com, isn’t owned or run by Bell or his group. It’s the property of a British domain-squatting company called Get on the Web Limited, which has been trying to sell that domain for nearly 17 years. A message sent to the “supportcenter” address did not bounce back, indicating that it’s an active email address. But Get on the Web told PAY DIRT that Bell’s group has nothing to do with the domain.
“We have never heard of the Keep America Great Committee and have no connection nor interaction whatsoever with this organisation,” a company representative said in an email. “This is clearly a misprint on their website.”
