Late Sunday night, hackers attacked the website of GiveSendGo, a Delaware-based Christian crowdfunding platform that facilitated the collection of over $8.7 million worth of donations for the Freedom Convoy, the trucker protests in Canada.
Hackers redirected to the domain GiveSendGone.wtf and showed a scene from the Disney film "Frozen" as a backdrop and a manifesto criticizing the Freedom Convoy.
According to The Daily Dot's Mikael Thalen, the redirected website addressed "GiveSendGo grifters and hatriots" who "raised to fund an insurrection." The hackers alleged without proof that GiveSendGo donors "helped fund the January 6th insurrection in the U.S." and "helped fund an insurrection in Ottawa."
"You are committed to funding anything that keeps the raging fire of misinformation going until that it burns the world's collective democracies down," the hackers alleged in the manifesto.
"The leaders of this 'movement' are known extremists who publicly stated that they want to overthrow the government," the hackers wrote without any evidence proving their claims. "They held a city hostage for weeks while terrorizing the peaceful citizens who live there."
Finally, the hackers, again without proof, accused GiveSendGo of having "a history of providing a platform for individuals and organized groups to fund hate groups, promote disinformation and insurrection disguised as 'protests.' Most of their larger campaigns are, in some way, a continuing threat to democracy."
According to the National Post, the hackers also published a spreadsheet of raw donor data that contained names, emails, and dollar amounts of about 93,000 individuals who purportedly donated funds to the Freedom Convoy. This included an American tech billionaire, two NASA employees, and Canadian civil servants, among many others.
The report verified that all donations, except 686, were below $1,000 each. The largest donation of $215,000 was made on February 6 and was listed as "Processed but not recorded" without any other information. The largest named donation of $90,000 was made on February 9 by American tech billionaire Thomas Siebel, founder of enterprise software company Siebel Systems and artificial intelligence software platform and applications company C3.ai. He also provided a $9,000 donation to GiveSendGo.
Among the other donations was the largest donation of $75,000 from Canada, with an added $1,000 in GiveSendGo's tip jar made by the president of a New Brunswick-based pressure washer manufacturer. The London, Ontario-based vice president of the AutoCanada car dealership chain also donated $25,000, while the chair of a Cannington, Ontario-based community and family support organization donated $20,000. Ben Pogue, a Dallas, Texas-based construction magnate who donated over $200,000 to help re-elect former U.S. president Donald Trump, donated $20,000 to the Freedom Convoy.
The Christian Post reported that last week the Ontario Superior Court of Justice issued an order to halt access to the funds raised by GiveSendGo. On Saturday, the crowdfunding site took to Twitter to clarify that the funds for the Freedom Convoy are "not frozen contrary to what you might be hearing on the news" and that they were "working with many different campaign organizers to find the most effective legal ways to continue funds flowing."
