Which U.S. communities sent money to support the Canadian trucker protests?
Residents in wealthy enclaves across the United States — from Beverly Hills, Calif., to suburbs of Austin, to Florida beach communities — sent millions of dollars to support trucker convoys that occupied the Canadian capital and shut down commerce at key border crossings between the two nations, according to a Washington Post analysis of leaked fundraising data posted online over the past 48 hours.
The richer an American community was, the more likely residents there were to donate, and the biggest number of contributions often came from communities where registered Republicans made up solid majorities, according to the review of more than 55,000 U.S.-based donations through the Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo. The site, which had suffered multiple security breaches over the past year, emerged as a fundraising magnet early this month after the better-known online fundraising platform, GoFundMe, stopped accepting donations for the convoy. GoFundMe pulled away after saying the occupation born out of opposition to vaccine requirements for truckers violated its policies.
Hackers began to extract the information about donors to the controversial protest shortly after the Super Bowl began Sunday evening, the site’s co-founder Jacob Wells told The Post in an interview. Someone posing as a donor was able to make changes that gave the intruder administrative powers. The hack did not necessarily reveal donors’ identities, he said, because users are not required to give a real name or authentic email address to send money. But the site requires a donor to supply a zip code when making a credit card transaction to guard against fraud, Wells said, thereby revealing the locations of nearly all U.S. contributors.
“It’s true, this was a campaign funded almost entirely by Canadians and Americans,” Wells said. “And it’s not over, we’re pursuing every legal means to continue to get the money where donors intend it to go.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/02/15/american-donors-freedom-convoy-zipcodes/
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