Activity tagged "astroturfing"

Coinbase has tried to portray its “Stand With Crypto” PAC as having broad grassroots support among over a million “crypto advocates”, and boasts on its homepage of nearly $180 million raised by these advocates.

Its first quarterly FEC filing reveals it has had only $13,690 in contributions from seven people over the most recent three-month period. Two of them work for Stand With Crypto and two of them work for Coinbase.

After my reporting about the falsified donations amount on the Stand With Crypto homepage, the PAC added a tooltip that acknowledges that $177.8 million of the “donations by crypto advocates” are actually the multi million dollar donations by a handful of big crypto companies and their executives.

However, they still claim that $1.48 million was raised by Stand With Crypto itself. Either they've raised 99% of their funds in the last 19 days, or they’re doing more funny business with the numbers they’re claiming.

Coinbase's "Stand With Crypto" PAC website is now confirming what I reported earlier.

More than 99% of the amount they claimed was raised by this supposedly "grassroots" PAC is in fact massive corporate contributions to the FairShake super PAC.

Coinbase’s “Stand With Crypto” PAC claims to have raised $87 million, but their donations list totals up to only $1,176,900. They seem to be double-counting corporate contributions to super PACs to overstate how much their “community” supports this supposedly grassroots project.

The list trails off at donations of $44.67, so there could be additional smaller donations not shown on the page, but not more than $85 million’s worth.

The Stand With Crypto PAC was registered just days after the April quarterly filing deadline, so they have not yet had to file any receipts with the FEC.