Eugene Hoshiko/AP Photo

AI-generated videos of Tucker Carlson, Martin Luther King Jr., and former President Donald Trump begged viewers to help in the MAGA re-election effort. Then, the credit card charges came.

By Emily Baker-White, Forbes Staff

The ad begins with a grainy but unmistakable video of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Soft, tense piano music plays in the background as he speaks: “We’ve been told again and again that we cannot vote for the man that did more for the Black community than any other president. If a Black man dares speak out in support of Donald Trump, a Democrat is always there to call that man an Uncle Tom, a house negro, or even worse.”

The fake King continues for more than two minutes, praising Trump and trashing Democrats as photos and short videos of Black prison inmates, Democratic politicians and scenes of civil unrest cycle in the background. Then, the voice changes abruptly and implores viewers to take a free poll to support former President Trump. Complete it and they’ll be sent a free Trump flag, it says; they’ll need only cover shipping and handling.

It doesn’t mention the $80 recurring credit card charges they’ll incur after checking out.

When potential “customers” click through to receive their free Trump flag, they are routed through several intermediary websites to a final one that processes their credit card information. It explains, in very fine print, that by entering their card information, “customers” acknowledge that they will incur a recurring charge for membership in a MAGA-themed club.

When that charge comes through, it’s almost always unexpected, according to three victims Forbes spoke to and several dozen Facebook comments left by others. It’s also confusing, as it doesn’t originate with the Trump flag site; instead it comes from a web site they never visited. The FTC and Justice Department have referred to this practice as “credit card laundering” — and pursued legal action against those who employ it.

Ads for the Trump flag scam have been viewed more than 100 million times on Facebook recently, according to the company’s ad library. One page running them has spent $1,500,000 in the past four months alone, making it Meta’s fifth largest political spender this cycle. An account on YouTube has spent almost $800,000 to run nearly identical ads, which have been viewed more than 85 million times. It’s unclear how many people were scammed or how much money they’ve collectively lost, but the ad spend and scale of the operation indicates an amount in the millions. (Disclaimer: In a past life, I held content policy jobs at Facebook and Spotify.)

The Trump campaign did not respond to a comment request, but there is no evidence that Trump or his campaign has any relationship to the scam.

Fake King is not the only deepfake hawking this scheme — other ads from the pages have featured deepfakes of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump himself. The accounts behind the ads have also run hundreds of other, non-political ads on Facebook and YouTube in recent months featuring the deepfaked voices of Taylor Swift, Joe Rogan, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and other celebrities, claiming that viewers can receive $6,400 in free government subsidies if they simply call a number to enroll. The “free subsidy” claims were debunked by Reuters’ fact-checking unit in late 2023. (Facebook and YouTube took them down after a comment request from Forbes.) Carlson, Swift, Rogan, and Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.

Scams targeting Trump supporters are common online — last year, scammers used deepfakes to con people into buying thousands of dollars worth of “Trump Bucks,” Trump-themed bills that they falsely believed would be usable as legal tender. Just last month, Trump scams lured seniors into losing hundreds of thousands, thinking they were investing in Trump-themed preloaded debit cards. The problem has gotten bad enough that the Trump campaign rolled out an official “endorsement seal” to let people know which organizations and vendors are actually affiliated with the former president. (A number of the “free flag” ads identified themselves as “official” and implied coordination with the campaign.)

Variants of the flag scam have also run for years across social media — The Daily Beast wrote about a similar scheme that racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of ad spend on Snapchat in 2020. It is not clear whether ads for this current scam are also running on TikTok or on X (where Forbes has found tweets promoting it), because those platforms do not maintain political ad libraries in the United States.

So who’s behind the “free flag” scam? A Forbes investigation traced it through a tangled web of opaque and deceptive actors. There are those marketing the scam, including an advertiser engaged in a runaround of Facebook and YouTube’s transparency systems. There’s the company that occasionally does ship out Trump flags, which has its fingerprints on several hundred sham storefront websites. And then there is a rat’s nest of LLCs, facilitated by a company that pays people a monthly stipend to establish shell corporations in their names, potentially ruining their credit in the process. The pieces fit together in a way that minimizes each player’s exposure to the others’ misdeeds, and helps them evade crackdowns from platforms, banks and law enforcement.

Meta and Google investigated and took down the accounts promoting the Trump scam after being contacted by Forbes. The platforms said the accounts violated their policies on scams, fraud, and unacceptable business practices. (Both platforms also prohibit unlabeled deepfakes in political ads.) Meta told Forbes that after further investigation, it also referred the matter to law enforcement and issued a cease & desist.

This January, on a new YouTube vlog called The Get Rich Show, a 30-year-old entrepreneur named Dan Wang introduced himself from the driver’s seat of a $500,000 Ferrari as a “long-term investor and part-time degenerate gambler.” Proprietor of a business called Digital Uprising LLC., Wang has said that he can make in a week whatever his dad, a software engineer, “makes in a year.” His Instagram — “Steady Rev Streams 🤝 High Risk Plays” — showcases his collection of guns and Bored Ape NFTs.

Wang’s Facebook and YouTube accounts were among those promoting the Trump merch scheme and the government subsidy scam, he confirmed in an interview with Forbes. But he didn’t post the deepfakes, he said; instead, they were published by one or more of the nearly 100 clients whom Wang gives direct access to his ad accounts, in exchange for a percentage of their total ad spend. In all, this web of marketers use his accounts to place hundreds of thousands of ads per day selling all kinds of things; each time people click through and buy, they get a cut.

“We kind of rely on our YouTube and Facebook reps, as well as their review systems, to catch whatever is being run that’s against policy,” he said.

Wang declined to disclose which of his clients had posted the deepfake ads, but said that some of them are based in India and Singapore. Both Meta and Google prohibit foreign entities from placing political ads in the United States, and they also prohibit account owners from renting or selling access to their accounts in the way Wang described doing. Without this prohibition (and robust detection and enforcement of it), a secondary market for access to accounts like Wang’s could enable banned scammers — and potentially even foreign governments — to operate on the platforms indirectly without detection. After Forbes flagged Wang’s accounts and posts to Meta and Google, they were taken down.

Wang’s clients are not the only people who have promoted this particular Trump merch bait and switch. Forbes found that brothers Zakir and Amaan Khan, affiliate marketers in Las Vegas, have also run ads directing viewers to the Trump merch operation. They did not respond to a request for comment.

Wang told Forbes he does not know who controls the websites that the Trump ads promote, and it’s likely that the Khans do not either, as many affiliate marketers direct traffic to websites without knowing who is behind them.

But the site where victims put in their credit card information thinking they’ll get a free Trump flag lists a return address, which Forbes was able to trace to a dropshipping business in Florida called Save Rack run by a man named Audi Kowalski. (Kowalski did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

That return address is also listed on more than 100 online storefronts tied to several dozen LLCs that appear to be employing a scheme to launder people’s credit and set up shell companies in their names — a practice that experts say is likely illegal.

Last summer, Alex* saw an ad on Craigslist offering people the opportunity to make “passive income” online with a minimal time commitment. When she asked for more details, a representative from a company called Vertical Merchants reached out. Alex would be joining something called an IBO, or an “Independent Business Owner” program. The program was only available to U.S. citizens over age 18, who would need to have good credit to qualify. If Alex was accepted into the IBO program, Vertical Merchants would pay her up to $1,000 each month in exchange for the right to set up an LLC and bank account in her name. She would technically be the owner of some online stores, but they would handle the day-to-day – she wouldn’t have anything to do with their operation.

Ecommerce businesses might want to have an LLC tied to a person with good credit like this if their customers are regularly disputing credit card charges. When a business incurs an unusually high number of these chargebacks, banks can place them on notice, assess fines against them and even shut down their ability to process payments. Vertical Merchants provides a service to those high-chargeback businesses, enabling them to distribute their payments across many different accounts so that they can evade chargeback thresholds.

Alex took the opportunity, and a slate of websites were set up in her name and the name of an LLC registered to her. They listed Kowalski’s PO box as their return address.

Adam Levitin, a professor at Georgetown Law School and expert in consumer protection law, told Forbes that the Vertical Merchants model likely violates federal and state laws against deceptive business practices, because customers believe they are transacting with one company, while really, they are transacting with another. He also predicted that it would violate banks’ credit card processing rules, once they realized what was going on.

In an interview with Forbes, Alex acknowledged that signing up for the program was “probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.” She seemed to recognize in real time that she could be risking her credit, or even potentially incurring liability for others’ misdeeds.

Forbes spoke to two other people who used their own names to set up LLCs involved in the Trump merch effort. One said they were unfamiliar with Vertical Merchants, but had received payments from BABI Media LLC, an entity registered to Bruce Workman, the retired father of a VP of Technology and Marketing at Kowalski’s dropshipping firm.

Vertical Merchants, Kowalski and Workman did not respond to multiple requests for comment. However, after Forbes sent out requests, 89 websites tied to the effort — including the transaction pages where would-be flag customers handed over their credit card numbers — went offline.

*Not her real name. Forbes has granted anonymity to several sources who feared retribution from their employers.

Iain Martin, Thomas Brewster, and Adam Miller contributed reporting.

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