Description

I received an email claiming to be from California Governor Gavin Newsom (or, one could assume, his communications team), offering to send me a copy of his book if I donated any amount of money to Democratic political causes via ActBlue. Above the buttons that you can click to donate specific amounts of money (ranging from $3 to $250, with an additional option for “Other Amount”), there is the following message: "If you've stored your info with ActBlue, we'll process your contribution instantly.” ActBlue is the site that handles donations to most liberal political candidates. I’ve donated to various liberal candidates over the years using the ActBlue site, and donations are made public, so that’s likely where the scammer got my information. The parlance used in the email was very atypical of a politician or PAC: hyper-casual language, poor sentence construction, and glaring grammatical errors.