Learn about ActBlue’s Secure Platform

ActBlue is proud to serve as a trusted platform that empowers small-dollar donors to legally and securely contribute to political candidates, political action committees, and other political and nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations. Our robust security program and strict fraud prevention measures help us rigorously protect donors’ information, root out potentially unlawful foreign contributions, protect donors from financial fraud, and flag other potentially unlawful or fraudulent activity. As a result, donors, candidates, and organizations can feel confident that their information is safe and our platform is secure.

ActBlue holds itself to the highest legal and ethical standards, and all contributions made through ActBlue are disclosed in full compliance with federal, state, and local laws. Here are some more details about how ActBlue makes security a top priority:

ActBlue implements a thorough and effective screening process to verify donors and prevent fraud:

• Contributions made through ActBlue are reviewed, and if they fail to meet our rigorous standards of compliance, are rejected.
• We use a widely trusted external fraud prevention tool to assess donations for indications of fraud. The tool uses behavioral modeling and evaluates over 140 behavioral signals such as the age of the card, card type, the issuer country, recent address changes, and proprietary signals at the individual cardholder level to help flag fraudulent behavior. These signals help detect whether a card is being used fraudulently, such as by someone other than the actual donor, and help detect whether a card may be associated with a foreign contributor.
• Donations that are flagged for further review by our fraud detection tool are also manually reviewed by ActBlue to determine if they comply with our standards  and should be accepted – or should be denied.
• We use the industry-standard Address Verification Service (AVS) to ensure cardholder addresses match those at issuing banks.
• Our certified credit card security program to protect donor information receives the highest ratings for compliance and payment security standards possible for merchants under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
• We offer a variety of account-level security features including authentication tools for secure sign-in, security dashboards, and customizable security notification emails. 

We require donors entering a new credit card number when giving on the ActBlue platform to submit their Card Verification Value (CVV).¹

• CVV is a security feature on credit and debit cards that merchants may choose to use to help prevent unauthorized transactions. CVV is not an identity verification method but rather a way to help verify that the person making the transaction has physical access to the payment card. 
• It is one part of several pieces of information (e.g., card number, expiration date, name, address, IP address, transaction history, etc.) that are used collectively to assess the legitimacy of an online transaction.
• ActBlue requires donors to provide their CVV when they make a contribution on our platform with a new card, a practice we began expanding in 2023 and required for all in January 2024.

ActBlue’s platform is designed to give donors full control and confidence in their donations from start to finish.

• We are committed to ensuring that all donors have a positive experience contributing to candidates and campaigns through ActBlue, and we address customer service inquiries, including donor questions about a charge on their credit card, their account, or using the platform.
• Our contact form allows consumers to communicate directly with our Support team to ask questions, request refunds if needed, or obtain other assistance. Our in-house Customer Support team responds promptly to donor requests.

Donations made through ActBlue are disclosed in full compliance with federal, state, and local laws.

• ActBlue serves as a non-profit intermediary that enables individuals to make secure and legal contributions to political candidates, political action committees, and other political and nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations.
• In full compliance with federal, state, and local campaign finance laws, ActBlue regularly files public reports of all contributions made on its platform.
• ActBlue clearly discloses contribution rules, including that only U.S. citizens or lawfully admitted permanent residents may contribute and that contributions must be made on a donor’s own personal credit card.
• Because of how reporting works for intermediaries, contributions made on platforms like ours often show up more than once in public FEC records, because both ActBlue and the receiving campaign or committee must report the contributions. FEC rules require ActBlue to itemize every contribution made through its platform, regardless of amount.
• Monthly donations and tandem contributions (in which the donor splits one contribution between several candidates or committees) are each counted as separate individual contributions on FEC reports, as are optional tips to ActBlue. This can result in a high number of FEC report entries, including many that appear duplicative.
• Additionally, FEC reports often lump multiple donors with the same name together. This can make it difficult to easily identify which contributions should be associated with each individual donor, especially donors with common names.

1. There are, however, a few exceptions, including in situations where performing CVV verification would result in PCI DSS noncompliance. For instance, we are currently unable to verify CVV outside of the course of a transaction, such as when adding a card to an ActBlue Express profile outside of a transaction. Additionally, all third-party payment services, such as Apple and Google Pay, handle card verification internally and use tokenization to secure transactions. ↩︎