At a glance, the two websites look virtually indistinguishable. Both feature a photo of Donald Trump, in a suit and red tie, in front of a giant American flag. Both seemingly offer a chance for two to win dinner with Donald Trump. 
 
 One is at donaldjtrump.com; the other is at dinnerwithtrump.org. 
 
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 The first belongs to Trump’s campaign. The second is a scheme run by Ian Hawes, a 25-year-old Maryland man who has no affiliation with Trump or his campaign and who has preyed on more than 20,000 unsuspecting donors, collecting more than $1 million in the process. 
 
 In just its first three weeks of operation, Hawes’ PAC spent more than $108,000 on Facebook ads, offering an opportunity to win “Dinner with Donald Trump” — and netted itself nearly $350,000 in donations, according to federal records. 
 
 The biggest chunk of the money raised — $133,000 — went to a company that Hawes founded and owns, CartSoft LLC. The purpose of the payments is described on federal records as “media” and “media purchasing,” though CartSoft’s website describes itself as an online payment-processing platform. 
 
 Since its launch, the PAC has collected more than $1 million, Hawes told POLITICO. It has reportedly spent $0 on behalf of Trump. 
 
 “I feel ripped off and taken advantage of. This is horrible. That was not my intent,” said Mary Pat Kulina, who owns a paper-shredding company in Maryland and gave $265 to Hawes’ group. Kulina thought she had given to Trump’s campaign until told otherwise by POLITICO. “This is robbery,” she said. “I want my money back and I want them to add up what they stole from people and give it to Donald Trump.” 
 
 Of the 156 donors who gave more than $200 to Hawes’ group in June — the threshold for names to be included in federal filings — POLITICO contacted dozens and spoke with 11. Everyone interviewed said they believed they had given to Trump’s campaign, not an unconnected PAC. 
 
 “I would say, unfortunately, that’s simply a matter of pure chance,” Hawes said in an interview defending his group and denying it is a scam. 
 
 Hours after POLITICO published this story, Trump’s campaign sent a letter to Hawes accusing him of “defrauding” his donors and asking him to cease-and-desist. 
 
 But the dinner scheme is just the beginning. By late July, Hawes — who in his Twitter bio calls himself a “registered genius, board certified hacker, and grape soda connoisseur” — had launched another website, crookedhillary2016.org, according to Internet domain registration records, and began promoting a contest to revoke her security clearance. The group’s Facebook page copies the “Crooked Hillary” logo that is used on Trump’s official LyingCrookedHillary.com site. 
 
 “We're raising $1 million dollars from small donors to fight Crooked Hillary's campaign of lies,” reads Hawes’ site. Hawes also registered imwithtrump.org in late June, records show, though that site remains dormant. 
 
 As of Sunday, Hawes’ group had raised $1.1 million from 21,253 donors, he said. More than 410,000 people had signed up for the dinner contest — giving him a massive email list he can leverage for more money for years to come. 
 
 Internet-based scam PACs are hardly new to 2016. In the past, some have made look-alike campaign sites and bought Google ads to lure unsuspecting donors. Facebook, with its vast audience and ability to target users by political ideology, has proved an alluring tool this cycle, and Trump, with legions of passionate fans, has become an appealing target. Facebook declined to comment for this story. 
 
 Because Hawes’ PAC has zero ties to Trump’s campaign, the dinner it is dangling won’t be very intimate. The fine print — in gray, size 8.5-font on a black background at the bottom of the website — discloses that this “dinner” actually amounts to the PAC buying two tickets “at a Sponsor-selected fundraising evening event held with Donald Trump and other attendees.” 
 
 David Easlick, a lawyer in Virginia, gave more than $1,000 to American Horizons PAC. “I assumed it was coming from Trump and we donated $1,000 because you might have a better chance than if you’d given $100,” Easlick said. 
 
 He asked with more than a hint of resignation, “Is it a fraud or something?” 
 
 Hawes’ site doesn’t initially ask for money. First, one can enter the dinner contest simply by providing an email address. But it quickly offers a chance to “double your chances” by donating, even though the fine print states, “Contributing will not improve chances of winning.” 
 
 One person, Jared Peavler of Indiana, posted screenshots of his correspondence with Hawes’ group on Facebook after he complained it was a scam. “I’d like to point out that it clearly states that contributing does NOT increase chances of winning both in the rules within the link and at the bottom of the email,” Peavler wrote, adding in all-caps, “EAT SHIT!” 
 
 An email signed by Hawes replied. “Monetary contributions don’t increase your chance of winning, but we do multiply your entries. We’re also a political action committee, so it’s our job to collect contributions. So you can eat your own shit.” 
 
 Peavler told POLITICO: “That was when I knew it was fake. Professionals don't allow themselves to be drawn into an unprofessional conversation like that.” (Hawes said he did not recall writing such an email and that his records did not show any such correspondence. “That’s not something we would say,” he said. “Pissing people off is not something that we’re trying to do.”) 
 
 Another donor, Jeanie Boro, an insurance broker in California, gave $1,015 to the group before she saw in the fine print that it wasn’t actually affiliated with Trump. “I thought it was very deceiving. I was very upset,” Boro said. She demanded and received a refund. 
 
 If people complain, Hawes said, “We’ll be happy to return your donations right away.” They had processed 110 refunds to date, he said. (Those who want their money back can email help@americanhorizons.org.) 
 
 American Horizons PAC, which Hawes registered with the Federal Election Commission on June 10, is actually the second incarnation of a “Dinner with Donald Trump” scheme — though both have ties to Hawes. 
 
 The top screen, bearing the Trump-Pence logo, is the official campaign "Dinner with Trump" fundraising raffle. The bottom screen is from a scam PAC. | Screengrabs 
 
 An earlier group called the Recover America PAC was created in late November and registered by Michael Williams, a friend of Hawes’, who listed the same website — dinnerwithtrump.org — that the current dinner-promoting PAC is using. The contact number provided to the FEC on that filing was affiliated online with a company called Glexia, where both Williams (CEO and president) and Hawes (executive vice president) are listed as employees. That first effort, however, never reported any further activity, despite three subsequent letters from FEC attorneys demanding additional paperwork. 
 
 Then, in June, Hawes revived the idea. The new PAC immediately began buying Facebook ads, starting with $750 per day on June 10 and building up to more than $15,000 on June 29. In three weeks, the group had raised $349,958. 
 
 Hawes took advantage of a vacuum left by a skeletal Trump operation that had failed to activate supporters online and protect its digital turf; Hawes noted he bought Facebook ads and solicited money via email before Trump ever did, and created the dinner contest first. 
 
 He said Trump’s campaign has never contacted the PAC to request that it stop using his name, even though the campaign did so to the FEC last fall about some other groups. The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this story. 
 
 “I applaud anyone that wants to dig into our financials, but they’re looking at the wrong political organization,” Hawes said. 
 
 So far, his group’s biggest expenditure was to his company CartSoft. The next report is due in mid-October. Hawes declined to say what his personal cut has been. 
 
 “I don’t want to say the number is zero, because that’s not true,” he said, calling any CartSoft profits “a standard mark-up.” 
 
 FEC commissioner Ann Ravel declined to discuss any specific potential cases but said that, in general, the FEC is too powerless when it comes to combating fraud. 
 
 “That’s the frustration I have, that there’s very little recourse,” she said. “People give money thinking it’s going to go to a particular person or a particular cause, and it’s a consumer protection issue as far as I’m concerned.” 
 
 John McQueen, a funeral home owner in Florida, remembered seeing the ad in his Facebook feed. “I had planned to give a thousand bucks to his campaign, and when my wife saw it also on her Facebook feed she said, ‘Why not do this?’” he recalled. 
 
 He gave $1,015 in late June. 
 
 “Who really reads the fine print?” he lamented. “If he wants to refund me my thousand bucks, I’m happy to turn around and give it to Mr. Trump.” 
 
 Hawes’ PAC ended June with $88,197 cash on hand. It is not clear what activities he has planned on Trump’s behalf this fall. “We use the money that we collect in a way that we feel best creates value for the people who have donated to us,” he said. 
 
 Hawes’ most recent activity online was posting publicly on his personal Facebook page that he got engaged in mid-August “on the bow of the yacht overlooking Miami.” 
 
 “Couldn't be more perfect!” he wrote, as he posted pictures of himself sipping champagne with his fiancé and of her glittering oval engagement ring. ||||| If the first $20 million yielded cheers, the second $15 million generated stunned silence. 
 
 Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz vaulted suddenly and without any advance warning to the top rung of Democratic party megadonors with two unheralded tears through his checkbook in the past six weeks. His money significantly altered the short-term financial position of the pro-Hillary Clinton forces and revealed a previously unknown source of cash for Democrats. 
 
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 In the days after Moskovitz's money landed, the party's leading finance operatives struggled to control their excitement at the prospect of finally having an answer to Republicans’ Sheldon Adelson in the shape of a Silicon Valley titan like the ones Democrats have been chasing after for well over a decade. 
 
 “This is a unicorn-type campaign gift — you just don’t see someone basically walk into a campaign without a significant track record of activity and contribute at this level,” said veteran Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House alum who works closely with top party donors in Silicon Valley. 
 
 The deeply private 32-year-old — who is worth $12.7 billion, according to Bloomberg — is a longtime philanthropist but political newcomer. He hasn’t started to build contacts with local operatives. And he hasn’t said a word publicly about his political involvement beyond a pair of Medium posts announcing it in the first place. 
 
 So now, grateful but puzzled Democrats in Washington and Silicon Valley are wondering, does Moskovitz’s move herald the dawning of the new age of tech money that they’ve been pursuing? Or is his unparalleled cash infusion a non-replicable, one-off response to Donald Trump? 
 
 Campaign cash from the tech industry has long skewed heavily to Democrats, and in recent cycles moguls have developed a practice of pitching in toward the end of the campaign to boost candidates, most notably Barack Obama in 2012. Clinton’s bid has even mobilized a set of tech icons to get more involved than ever before, most prominently Apple CEO Tim Cook and Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, a philanthropist and activist, as the era of Democratic resistance to giving massive donations to super PACs wanes. 
 
 But the $35 million from Moskovitz — who declined POLITICO’s request to talk about his political involvement — is far more than others have contributed, even though he wrote that such big donations to politics make him uncomfortable. And while top Democrats have developed close relationships with other Northern California luminaries as the community established itself as the party’s top money source, he has rarely been part of that circuit. (One email exchange released by WikiLeaks last week illustrates the dynamic: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in August 2015 asked Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta whether he would consider sitting down with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to discuss philanthropy and public policy, and Podesta agreed to set something up. Moskovitz’s name isn’t in any of the hacked Podesta emails.) 
 
 And before this cycle, Moskovitz’s only recorded political donations had been $5,200 to the failed 2014 House bid of Sean Eldridge, the husband of fellow Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, according to Center for Responsive Politics data. 
 
 Despite Moskovitz's hesitance to talk on the record about his involvement, his Twitter page has started to look like that of a regular political junkie, as he quotes Clinton while retweeting poll numbers. (On Oct. 12, he wrote "trumped up trickle down karma," noting Clinton's polling lead, shortly before tweeting a picture of Trump with the "demagorgon" from the TV show "Stranger Things" and calling it "This season's scariest halloween costume.") 
 
 But there was nothing before September that even hinted at the massive and sophisticated donation scheme he would unveil this time around. After announcing in September that he would drop $10 million into a Clinton campaign fund, the Senate and House Democrats’ campaign wings, MoveOn.org, the Color of Change PAC and voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups, plus $5 million each for the League of Conservation Voters and the union-backed For Our Future super PAC, he followed up early this month by pledging $7 million more to registration and mobilization organizations, $3 million to political groups, and $5 million to Priorities USA Action, the main pro-Clinton super PAC. 
 
 The sudden cash injection was unprecedented. 
 
 People familiar with Moskovitz's thinking say he had been inching toward politics after focusing primarily on philanthropy for years. But whether he joins the ranks of Tom Steyer or Haim Saban as top Democratic donors, or even becomes an Eric Schmidt-like ally to party leaders, local and national fundraisers are reluctant to guess. 
 
 Democratic operatives on the West Coast say they still haven’t met Moskovitz, haven’t seen him at party or candidate fundraising events, are not aware of whether he has a political representative helping him, and report that his name had never before been on their donation target lists. Multiple top Democrats responded to POLITICO’s questions about Moskovitz by simply replying, ‘Who?” and two admitted to looking up his name and donations on Google before responding to emails about him. 
 
 Indeed, they say, all indications are that his foray into politics is entirely driven by Trump, who Moskovitz savaged in his pair of blog posts announcing the donations, rather than a longer-term intention to become a political player. 
 
 “The Republican Party, and Donald Trump in particular, is running on a zero-sum vision, stressing a false contest between their constituency and the rest of the world. We believe their positions, especially on immigration, which purport to improve the lives of Americans, would in practice hurt citizens and noncitizens alike. In contrast, the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton in particular, is running on a vision of optimism, pragmatism, inclusiveness and mutual benefit,” Moskovitz wrote in September on behalf of himself and his wife, Cari Tuna, calling Trump’s promises “quite possibly a deliberate con, an attempt to rally energy and support without the ability to deliver. His proposals are so implausible that the nation is forced to worry that his interest in the presidency might not even extend beyond winning a contest and promoting his personal brand." 
 
 The day after the publication of a 2005 tape in which Trump made lewd remarks about women, Moskovitz piled on his second wave of cash: “Further investments are warranted, particularly in support of work targeting millennial and independent voters. These contributions will go towards voter outreach and engagement efforts focused on those key audiences,” he wrote. “The events of the past few weeks have only deepened my conviction that Hillary is the best choice for America. I hope that these contributions will help make that outcome a reality." 
 
 To fellow tech-world entrepreneurs and Northern California Democratic insiders, therefore, the development carries all the hallmarks of a major one-time investment — much to the frustration of party fundraising pros whose search for the next George Soros continues apace, but to the short-term delight of party operatives working to help Clinton zero in on the White House. 
 
 “Dustin is acting in the typical Silicon Valley way — be bold, go big, make a difference in the world,” said Steve Spinner, an entrepreneur and top-tier Democratic fundraiser. “Although rarely seen in politics, it’s not surprising at all given the type of person and leader he is."
– More than $1 million has been raised in the name of Donald Trump by a PAC—but zero dollars appear to have gone to help the GOP nominee, and donors are furious with the "registered genius" and "grape soda connoisseur" behind the setup, Politico reports. Ian Hawes is the 25-year-old behind dinnerwithtrump.org, a site not affiliated with Trump's campaign and that offers an exciting opportunity, if you're a Trump fan: a chance to win tickets to a Trump "fundraising event," complete with flight and hotel stay. That contest site, in addition to other fundraising efforts Hawes has made—including nearly $110,000 in Facebook ads, per federal records—has so far brought in $1.1 million from more than 21,000 donors, Hawes says. The issue: Donors say they thought this fundraising effort was part of Trump's campaign, though the fine print on the site notes it's simply giving away two tickets to a "Sponsor-selected fundraising evening event" with Trump in attendance. "I feel ripped off and taken advantage of. … This is robbery," says one donor who ponied up $256 to Hawes' American Horizons PAC, thinking she was donating directly to Trump's camp. Hawes denies he's pulling one over on anyone, noting that interested parties can enter the dinner contest without donating—though Politico notes a "double your chances" promotion is offered via multiple entries if someone contributes—and that the PAC will refund donations to anyone who asks for one. Plus, he adds, Trump's campaign has never told him to cease and desist using Trump's name. The "dinner with the Donald" site isn't Hawes' only moneymaker scheme: He's also launched crookedhillary2016.org—"to fight Crooked Hillary's campaign of lies"—and has registered imwithtrump.org, though that's not live yet. (The real Trump was closing the fundraising gap with Clinton earlier this month.)