Hacked convoy data shows more than half of donations came from U.S.
CBC
Although Canadians gave more money than Americans, more than half of the donations to the convoy protest made through the crowdfunding website GiveSendGo came from the United States, an analysis of hacked data from the site reveals.
The data — hacked illegally and released publicly late Sunday evening — sheds light on the identity of thousands of donors to the crowdfunding campaign.
A check by CBC News found that multiple names in the hacked data set correspond to names, dates and donation amounts collected independently by CBC News as the donations rolled in to GiveSendGo.
The data, which includes the home countries of donors, reveals that 55.7 per cent of the 92,844 donations made public came from donors in the United States, while just 39 per cent came from donors located in Canada.
But while the U.S. donations included a number of large contributions — in some cases from names matching the names of donors to former U.S. president Donald Trump's campaigns — Canadians actually gave more money in total to the convoy protest.
Of the $8.4 million US in donations detailed in the data, $4.3 million US — or 52.5 per cent of the total — came from Canada, while $3.6 million US (44.2 per cent) came from the U.S.
Other countries don't even come close. Great Britain provided the third-largest number of donors — 1,831 donations totalling $77,065.
The last donation listed in the data set was made the evening of Feb. 10.
Users who tried to access GiveSendGo.com on Sunday night were immediately rerouted to the domain GiveSendGone.wtf. There, a video of the Disney movie Frozen began playing, with a scrolling message addressing "GiveSendGo grifters and hatriots." A link to the hacked donor data appeared below the video.
It was up for several hours before GiveSendGo regained control of its domain and posted a message on its main page saying the site was offline for "maintenance and server upgrades."
GiveSendGo has not responded to questions from CBC News about the hack or what it plans to do next.
The money flowing into the protest exposed a gap in Canada's federal political financing rules. Those rules prohibit people who aren't Canadian citizens or permanent residents from donating to Canadian politicians or political parties — but they are silent on donations to political protests by those who aren't Canadian.
The protest has seen donations worth millions of dollars coming from people who chose to remain anonymous.
The popular GoFundMe crowdfunding platform collected more than $10 million from more than 120,000 donations before it shut the fundraising campaign down and announced that all donations would be refunded. An analysis by CBC News found that at least one-third of those donations were listed publicly as anonymous or under obviously fictitious names.
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