Following a recent security lapse which saw the passports and driver's licenses of donors to GiveSendGo exposed online, the alternative crowdfunding site has once again fallen under attack.
This time though, the site was hacked and the names and personal details of over 92,000 donors to Canada's ‘Freedom Convoy' were leaked online. While the database of 92,845 donors is no longer available om GiveSendGo, Vice managed to review a copy of the data to confirm its authenticity.
Although GiveSendGo allows donors to make their donations public, many people to choose to omit their names or to use their company's name instead. As a result, the leaked database contains a great deal of information that was never meant to be shared with the public such as the full names, email addresses and locations of donors. While some donors chose not to provide their names, the vast majority did including C3.ai CEO Tomas Siebel who donated $90k to the Freedom Convoy.
Freedom Convoy donations
When it came to where the majority of the donations to the Freedom Convoy came from, researcher Amarnath Amarasingam analyzed the leaked database to find that 56 percent of donations came from the US while 29 percent came from Canada. However, there were also thousands of donations from countries outside of North American including the UK, Australia and Ireland.
Even though more Americans than Canadians donated, Canadian donors were able to raise $4.3m compared to the $3.6m raised by American donors.
In addition to donor's personal information, many of them included messages alongside their donations that contained over 13,000 references to “God” or “Jesus” as well as thousands of references to “tyranny”. There were also some more troubling messages as well.
Ordinary citizens weren't the only ones who donated to the Freedom Convoy as Vice discovered email addresses from donors that claimed to work for NASA, the US military, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Transportation Security Administration and even the Department of Justice.
GiveSendGo site redirected
At this time, no one has yet to claim responsibility for hacking GiveSendGo's website which was redirected to GiveSendGone.wtf where a video from Disney's Frozen played alongside a message that read:
“Attention GiveSendGo grifters and hatriots. You helped fund the January 6th insurrection in the U.S. You helped fund an insurrection in Ottawa. In fact you are committed to fund anything that keeps the raging fire of misinformation going until it burns the world’s collective democracies down. On behalf of sane people worldwide who wish to continue living in a democracy, I am now telling you that GiveSendGo itself is now frozen.”
GiveSendGo is now back up online and so far, the Freedom Convoy 2022 campaign has raised $9.37m which is even more than was initially raised on GoFundMe before the funds were frozen.
Via Vice
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