Election Scams 2026: What the FBI Is Warning About and How to Stay Safe

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With the 2026 midterm election three weeks away, the FBI is warning that scammers are borrowing the season for their own purposes. In an October 15 public service announcement, the bureau says scammers "could exploit the 2026 US Midterm Election to perpetrate financial fraud schemes," and that these schemes "target victims across the United States."

This guide covers what the FBI describes, why election season is such good cover for fraud, and the habits that protect you. It is nonpartisan: the scammers do not care who you vote for, only whether you will click.

What the FBI Is Warning About

The FBI says scammers use the names, images, logos and slogans of candidates to fraudulently solicit campaign contributions, sell merchandise that is never delivered, or steal personal information for other fraud. The alert updates a similar warning from October 2024. It lists four main schemes:

• Campaign investment pools. Scammers promise a guaranteed return on campaign contributions that supposedly pays out after the candidate wins. Victims are encouraged to recruit others to raise their share. The FBI is blunt that campaign donations "are not an investment and will not increase in value nor be returned."
• Fake political action committees, sometimes called ScamPACs. Victims think they are donating to a real PAC, but the scammers have no connection to it and keep the money.
• Political merchandise that never ships. A classic non-delivery scam with a campaign logo on it.
• Fake voter registration messages. A text or email says you are not registered to vote and links to a fraudulent state registration page, which the FBI calls "a means to steal PII for identity theft and potentially to further target victims for additional fraud schemes."

AI Makes the Fakes Look Real

The FBI also notes that scammers use artificial intelligence tools to generate realistic voices, images and written messages that impersonate candidates, campaigns, government entities and trusted contacts. It adds that "the realism makes these schemes harder for victims to detect."

Max Gannon of Cofense, quoted by Help Net Security, puts it this way: "AI has erased the clumsy mistakes that once gave these scams away, so a cloned voice or a polished message from a 'campaign' can now look as convincing as the real thing." If you want the full picture of how cloned voices work, see our guide to AI voice cloning scams.

Why Election Season Is Perfect Cover

The simplest reason these scams work is that real political messages are everywhere, so a fake one does not stand out. The Mercury News explainer on political texts notes that political texts face fewer restrictions than commercial ones and are exempt from the Do Not Call Registry. It cites an estimate from the call-blocking app Robokiller that Americans received 15 billion political texts in 2022.

When your phone is already full of genuine fundraising and polling messages, one more urgent text from a "campaign" does not feel strange. Domain registrations follow the same pattern. AARP, citing a Check Point threat outlook, reports that over 4,000 "vote"-related web domains were registered in a single month in spring 2026. Some are legitimate, but many are used for scams, from donation fraud to phishing pages disguised as voter information sites. Check Point also concluded that phishing "remains one of the most likely operational threats surrounding the 2026 election cycle."

The Wider Scam Picture

Election fraud is one slice of a much larger problem. The FTC reports that in 2025, nearly 30% of people who reported losing money to a scam said it started on social media, with reported losses reaching $2.1 billion, about eight times the 2020 figure. By contact method, the FTC lists website or app (31%), social media (28%), phone call (11%), email (10%) and text (7%) among reports that indicated a loss.

Those figures cover all scam types, not elections specifically, and the FTC notes that most scams are never reported, so real losses are likely higher. The takeaway is that scams reach people through every channel at once. A fake campaign page can be shared on social media, texted to your phone, and promoted by a cloned voice on a call.

Red Flags to Watch For

• A guaranteed return on a donation. A real contribution is never an investment.
• Pressure to act fast or to recruit friends and family into a "pool."
• A text claiming you are not registered to vote, with a link to fix it.
• A request for your full Social Security number, bank details or a payment by gift card, wire or crypto.
• An unexpected call from a "candidate" or "campaign." AARP warns that caller ID can be spoofed to look like a campaign number.
• A seller of campaign merchandise you cannot find reviews for. The FBI suggests checking BBB.org.

What to Do Instead

Verify through a source you find yourself

• Check your registration at vote.gov, typed in yourself, never through a link in a message. AARP also advises that if someone claims you are not registered and offers to register you by phone, you should hang up.
• Check any PAC or committee on the Federal Election Commission website. The FBI adds that some scam PACs may appear registered, and that a PAC reporting high expenses for fundraising or administration may be a scam.
• Give through the candidate's official site, not through a text link. A source quoted by the Mercury News puts it simply: "If you want to support a campaign or a candidate, go to their website and contribute on your own."

Handle the message

• Do not click links or call numbers in unexpected texts, emails or voicemails.
• Forward suspicious texts to 7726 (SPAM) so your carrier can look at them, then delete them.
• Report election scams to your local FBI field office or to ic3.gov, with the phone number, website and payment method involved.

If you already clicked or paid

• Change the password for any account you entered, and use a different password on every account.
• Contact your bank or card issuer straight away about any payment.
• Watch your accounts and credit for unfamiliar activity, and read our guide to identity theft for next steps.

Where CyberFence Helps, and Where It Does Not

• Web Shield DNS blocking checks the domains your device tries to reach against known malware and phishing lists, which can stop a click on a reported fake page before it loads. It cannot catch a brand-new lookalike domain that nobody has reported yet. Our post on how DNS filtering works explains the limit.
• Breach Monitor, a separate CyberFence product, alerts you when your email appears in a known data leak. It does not watch what you type into a fake page, and it is not part of the $7.99 plan. See what Breach Monitor is.
• A VPN on its own does not stop scams. AES-256-GCM encryption protects your traffic on the network, but it cannot stop you from giving a password or donation to a fake page. Read whether a VPN protects from phishing for the full explanation.

In short, your own habits come first. DNS blocking is a backstop for the click you did not think twice about. For how the same tactics are spreading beyond elections, see our look at the phishing kits Microsoft just disrupted.

A Note for Small Teams

Election-themed lures do not only land on personal phones. Employees check texts and email on the same devices they use for work, and a fake "voter registration" or "survey" link can lead to a page that asks for a password. Gannon framed the pause-and-verify habit as one that "every employee can adopt," and it costs nothing to teach.

• Tell staff plainly which scams are circulating this month, and that reporting a mistake early is welcome.
• Agree that nobody enters a work login on a page they reached from a message.
• Give people one place to forward anything suspicious, so a fake page gets reported before a second person clicks.
• Keep work and personal sign-ins separate, so a stolen personal password does not open work accounts.

A Rule Everyone Can Follow

Gannon's advice is the simplest summary of this whole guide. When a message pressures you or provokes a strong reaction, pause and verify it through a source you find yourself, such as the FEC website or vote.gov, and never through the link you were sent or the contact details in the original message. That one habit defeats all four schemes the FBI describes.

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