Anti-Trump PAC Lincoln Project scammed for $35,000 after vendor email hack

The anti-Donald Trump  super PAC Lincoln Project lost $35,000 to a business email compromise (BEC) scam in February. 

Spokesman Greg Minchak confirmed the incident to the news site RawStory. 

Minchak described a classic BEC incident: “A vendor’s email was hacked, with the hackers producing authentic-looking invoices that were sent from our vendor’s legitimate email account,” he said. “The hack affected multiple clients of the vendor, including Lincoln Project.”

Two transactions were reported to the Federal Election Commission 12 days apart in February — for $20,000 and $15,000 — both of which Lincoln Project reported as “fraudulent” and “under dispute.”

In response to a query from Recorded Future News, the group declined to comment further on the incident. 

Lincoln Project was founded in 2019 by a group of Republican strategists opposed to Trump’s re-election bid. In 2020 the super PAC raised more than $80 million. 

Minchak told media that the “transactions did not impact our operations in any way in the fight for a democratic future for our nation.”

“Since it was the vendor that was hacked, we are letting them and our bank’s fraud department lead any investigation,” he said.

In 2023, the FBI reported receiving more than 21,000 complaints about BEC incidents resulting in adjusted losses of $2.9 billion.