Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo is offline, possibly due to a hack, amid a leak of alleged personal info of ~92K donors to the Canadian “Freedom Convoy”
The convoy’s donor base had already drawn scrutiny: a review of more than 80,000 donations tied promotion of the events to two major Facebook groups run by a Bangladeshi digital-marketing firm. The alleged exposure therefore affects a politically visible fundraising network as well as GiveSendGo itself.
First-order effects
GiveSendGo’s outage interrupts access to the donation service used by convoy supporters while the alleged exposure puts the personal information of roughly 92,000 donors at risk.
GiveSendGo must address both service availability and the alleged leak after its recent donor-document exposure, intensifying the immediate trust burden on the platform.
Second-order effects
Convoy organizers and supporters lose a dependable fundraising channel just after GoFundMe’s refund decision pushed the campaign’s donations toward GiveSendGo.
Other crowdfunding services handling contentious political campaigns face sharper scrutiny of their data protections, following GiveSendGo’s incident and the earlier Patreon data breach that exposed user information and source code.
Third-order effects
Political crowdfunding is becoming vulnerable to a two-part platform risk: services can restrict campaigns over conduct concerns, while platforms that accept them become high-value targets for data exposure.
If this pattern persists, fundraising organizers will weigh donor privacy and platform resilience alongside a service’s willingness to host politically contentious drives.
The trend: Contentious fundraising campaigns are concentrating attention on crowdfunding platforms’ moderation decisions, operational resilience, and protection of donor identities.
The Daily Wire's trucker convoy stories look pretty viral until you open up the CrowdTangle metrics and notice that the Daily Wire is using a network of contributor pages to share them 100s of times in a 24-hour period to make them trend on Facebook. Sad! https://www.garbageday.e…
In case you're wondering how things are going with the U.S. truck convoy: In one Facebook group with over 12,000 members, they're asking people how they should deal with the traitors, and these are some of the responses... https://twitter.com/...
Many of the donors to the $8.7M #FreedomConvoy2022 fundraising campaign on GiveSendGo didn't make their names public. Maybe it's because they work at the US Department of Justice, or NASA, or the TSA, or the Federal Bureau of Prisons... https://www.vice.com/...
I would usually blur out the names when sharing something from a Facebook group I am monitoring, but when you're talking about killing public officials who you don't agree with, I won't give you that courtesy.
1. Fascists post horrific shit 2. Fascists get moderated 3. Fascists flee to platforms catering to their politics 4. Platforms with growing concentrations of fascists are created by idiots who don't understand infosec 5. Fascists get doxxed, flee to a new platform 6. Repeat https…
Coming up on 24hours after GiveSendGo was hacked and a database of 92,000 donors to the #FreedomConvoy2022 fundraising campaign were leaked, the website is still down and the company has yet to comment https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Also included in the leaked data were the messages that some donors posted alongside their donations. The messages contained over 13,000 references to “God” or “Jesus” as well as thousands of references to “tyranny.” https://www.vice.com/...
Analysis of the leaked data shows that the majority of donors to the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” come from the U.S. - 56% compared to 29% from Canada. There are also thousands of donations from overseas, including the U.K., Australia, and Ireland. https://www.vice.com/...
The leaked data includes disturbing messages from donors, with one user writing “I look forward to the day you tyrants are swinging from a noose.” https://www.vice.com/...
It appears GiveSendGo has taken its entire site down after the names and emails of roughly 92k donors to the Freedom Convoy was leaked. Despite the leak of donor data and other sensitive data over the past week, the company has seemingly declined to inform its users. https://twit…
Wow. Quite a twist in the Freedom Convoy controversy: the platform that offered to keep taking donations when GoFundMe stopped has apparently now been hacked, so a list of all donors may be leaked. https://www.reuters.com/... There is really quite a lot going on in this story.