Profiteers are exploiting US conspiracies and hate to make millions

“Make cats safe again” read the MAGA-style baseball caps perched on the heads of five AI-generated felines printed on a black T-shirt alongside a Trump 2024 banner. It’s yours for just $29.99 (10% off if you order three) from United Patriot, an online store that proclaims it is “not afraid to speak the truth!”.

The T-shirt may seem innocuous enough. But its slogan in fact references a racist lie, spread by the presidential candidate, that Haitian migrants in Ohio had been eating local pets. The false claims have led to a wave of xenophobic abuse including bomb threats and vandalism against the local Haitian community.

The item is also one of thousands being sold by a group of online operators who are targeting the US election using hate, lies and conspiracy theories, all to make a quick buck.

United Patriot is one of four E-commerce companies identified by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) that have been advertising merchandise, often aimed at Trump supporters, using different levels of misinformation and hate speech.

Between them they have paid to publish over 15,000 “political” ads that have racked up millions of impressions on Facebook. And though the operations present themselves as patriotic outlets selling US products, TBIJ has found evidence suggesting many are being at least partly run from overseas.

TBIJ has also investigated an online betting scam run through hundreds of Facebook accounts that lures in punters with wild and hate-filled conspiracy theories about the US election.

Both operations are just examples of a bigger global problem that goes far beyond one election in one country.

“Evidence has shown that we engage more with content that is provocative and emotionally charged,” says Hannah Perry, digital policy head of research at think tank Demos. “Because algorithms on platforms such as Facebook are designed to optimise for engagement - keeping us on platforms for longer and prolonging our exposure to advertising – such algorithms disproportionately surface inflammatory and divisive content.

“Actors will no doubt target the US election to attract an outsized audience relative to other domestic stories.”

The operations we found are all enabled by the economics of the internet, which encourage workers from Nigeria to the Philippines to the US to amplify hate and falsehoods to millions in the pursuit of profit. And they show how people simply out to make money currently have their sights set on one of the most finely-balanced elections in history.

From Biden to betting scams

“A White House video in which Joe Biden goes 45 seconds without blinking is raising serious questions about who is currently serving as President of the United States,” says a presenter over a picture of the current president, claiming he has been dead since June 2022.

The video, produced by The People’s Voice, a channel on the Rumble platform, is clearly aimed at capturing conspiracy-minded Americans. It is just one of hundreds of US-focused posts hosted on a network of Facebook pages run largely from Nigeria aimed at extracting money for sports betting scams. Twenty-five of the most active pages identified by TBIJ amassed more than 669,000 followers, more than doubling from 290,000 followers last year. Eleven have been deleted over the past two months, but the network retains more than half a million followers.

An investigation by Nigerian media outlet HumAngle reported in September that the wider network, which may be as large as 240 Facebook pages, appears to scam people out of money by offering them the opportunity to profit from high-odd bets placed on what the pages say are “fixed” sports matches. And despite HumAngle’s reporting, 196 of the accounts remain active with a combined following of more than 2.6 million accounts.

To attract users to these scams, the pages have been boosting engagement by publishing political content, in particular conspiracy theories and false claims about the US presidential race. TBIJ came across a spate of such theories. Some posts falsely claimed Kamala Harris is a man. Others focused on the idea that natural disasters such as Hurricanes Helene and Milton were engineered by Democrat leaders to prevent people from voting in swing states. Both are conspiracy theories that have gained traction in the last few months.

The pages have co-opted the branding of hacktivist movement Anonymous, an ostensibly anti-establishment group of online activists and hackers that rose to prominence in the early 2000s. Wearing masks similar to those adopted by the movement (originally taken from the film and comic book series V for Vendetta), those behind the scams will often overlay footage of themselves over clips pushing disinformation.

But while they align themselves with a political movement and push political falsehoods, they are using them to make money.

A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook parent company, told TBIJ: "Scammers persistently target people online and in the real world – and that’s why we work with governments, NGOs and law enforcement agencies to deter bad actors. This is a highly adversarial space and we continue to update our enforcement systems to respond to evolving scammer behaviour. We are reviewing the accounts shared with us and will enforce against any that violate our policies.”

Promoting popularity

Online marketing, whether it is promoting legitimate goods, hateful T-shirts or attempts to scam people out of their money, relies on getting people to see posts. Social media algorithms tend to boost content that they predict will attract a lot of attention.

In recent years it has become clear that conspiracy theories, misinformation and hate are very good at tapping into the emotions that drive this kind of engagement. And that, in turn, means that anyone with something to sell is incentivised to push that kind of content to boost their profits.

Other posts on the Nigerian network’s pages claim to be able to foresee the future. Predictions about politics or natural disasters are published alongside their claims to deliver returns on making high-risk bets. They also often post “testimonials” – short videos depicting people thanking Anonymous for “changing their lives” through fixed sports betting. All are gateways to participate in sports bettings scams.

According to a conversation with admins of one of the pages, a ticket to participate in the fixed betting would cost someone $4,250. A “mini-ticket” costs $2,100. TBIJ obtained a bitcoin address used by one such page with about 70,000 followers, and found that the wallet had facilitated nearly $1m worth of transactions. These schemes have been used to scam many Nigerians and others over the years, according to HumAngle.

The target market is however, far more global.

As the US election has gained pace, the volume of content on the network of sites aimed at US citizens has ramped up, remaining relevant by referencing new events.

Many posts piggyback on false claims about Us government relief available to hurricane victims, such as the Trump campaign’s claims that relief funding was restricted because the money was instead going to immigrants or the war in Ukraine. “I hate that our government never runs out of money for illegals and foreign wars. But runs out of money to help struggling Americans,” reads one.

Another shows an AI-generated picture of Donald Trump standing in a flooded area and handing toilet paper to the victims, captioned “a picture they don’t want you to see”.

Profiting off ‘patriotism’

Like the Nigerian network, E-commerce merch stores rely heavily on Facebook for their marketing and promote similar conspiracy theories in order to gain traction.

Many of the ads run by United Patriot include graphics that reference and promote destroying the pride flag, misogynistic slurs against Harris, transphobia, no vax logos, anti-Ukrainian sentiment, gun ownership and mentions of the “stolen election”.

Misogyny aimed at Harris regularly featured in ads run by another of the sites, which also sells merch containing anti-trans slurs. Another of the sites posted a video falsely claiming Dominion voting machines helped steal the election from Trump.

The messages, potentially misleading US citizens or stoking hate towards various groups, will have been seen by many times more people than actually made a purchase.

Those running the network of Facebook pages in Nigeria may simply believe that US-focused clickbait is the best way to boost the number of people who see their scams. In contrast, the E-commerce operations identified by TBIJ give every impression that they are proudly American.

Yet analysis of their listed addresses and online presence suggests that the businesses are at least partly run from Vietnam, the Philippines, Pakistan, India and Croatia (with Facebook page admins based in those countries, as well as US based ones). None of the E-commerce sites found by TBIJ provided a US address that could be tied to their business.

United Patriot, which says its “patriotic collection of amazing apparel items … are all printed locally here in America”, claims on its Facebook page and website to be located at an address in Gardena, California. However, TBIJ could not find proof of that business registered at the address. The only other commercial activity found at this address was a warehouse providing services for wholesale shipments for people based overseas, as well as two online stores which have been accused in Google reviews of being scams.

The Better Business Bureau, a non-profit focused on “marketplace trust”, told United Patriot in November 2022 that it should change or substantiate claims made on its website about items “printed in the US”.

Another such site, Red First LLC, says it is based in Carrollton, Texas, at the same address as a fraudulent merchant claiming to resell Ralph Lauren clothing. This does not necessarily mean the companies are owned by the same person, but suggests the address may have been used by scammers.

Nor are all these operations avowedly rightwing. Red First LLC (which traffics notably less in hate and misinformation than the other three companies) has created at least 5,000 ads over the last two years. While it promotes mostly rightwing merchandise and content, such as T-shirts bearing misogynistic insults towards Kamala Harris and signs suggesting the 2020 election was stolen, it has also in a small number of cases posted pro-Harris content. The commercial imperative behind the operation means it isn’t averse to backing the other side.

Meta under scrutiny

As attempts to influence public opinion and elections have ramped up across social media, companies such as Facebook owner Meta have come under scrutiny for the role they play in hosting bad actors trying to polarise public opinion on their platforms.

In 2021 Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, blew the whistle on the company’s role in spreading disinformation and the increase in racial hatred. Numerous studies have also shown that social media platforms’ algorithms, including Facebook’s, create bigger engagement opportunities for far-right, conspiratorial and hateful content.

“The US election is an already fraught and divisive political event. If the aim of these scammers is to bring people in, then appealing directly to emotion to circumvent media criticality is key,” says Joe Ondrak, senior research and technology lead at the anti-disinformation startup Logically.

“There is likely a large pool of potential victims and easily exploitable narratives for them to choose from. The way algorithms reward engagement means that misinformation, conspiracy theory and hate speech are easy ways to find a wide audience.”