The trucker-led protests that paralyzed downtown Ottawa and galvanized supporters across the world ended Feb. 20 without achieving their goal of ending Canada’s COVID-19 restrictions. But there was one clear winner from the demonstrations: GiveSendGo, the “Christian crowdfunding site” where the truckers raised millions for their protests.
The formerly obscure Boston-based company has recently positioned itself as a crowdfunding platform for controversial right-wing causes, including legal defense funds for Kyle Rittenhouse, the Jan. 6 rioters and “whistleblowers” who spread anti-vaccine disinformation. So when the crowdfunding giant GoFundMe cut off the popular “Freedom Convoy” campaign for the truckers, GiveSendGo seized the opportunity by promoting itself as an alternative. The platform allowed supporters to quickly raise more than $9M for Canadian truckers.Flooding the site with over 100,000 donations
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GiveSendGo was also left with lots of cash. This platform seems to have received more than $640,000 in “gift” donations from supporters of the “Freedom Convoy 2022” campaign and a similar “Adopt a Trucker” effort, according to an analysis of leaked data shared with TIME by DDoS Secrets, a whistleblower non-profit which obtained the data after an apparent hack.
These are voluntary donations that supporters are encouraged to tack on to their final contribution as a “tip” to the site. This was just one example of the pattern. According to TIME’s analysis of the GiveSendGo campaigns in the leaked data set, the platform itself appears to have received at least $2.6 million in such “gifts” from more than 8,000 fundraisers since July 2017.
It’s a huge sum for a company that has only recently swelled to just 25 employees who work remotely. Jacob Wells is the co-founder and CEO of GiveSendGo. He acknowledges that giving back to controversial causes was key to their growth. “Anybody that’s been in business and in marketing a company recognizes that there is value to stirring the pot,” he told TIME in an interview Feb. 23, “because it gets your name going around.”
Wells did not dispute the figures of the company’s profits disclosed in the leaked data, but cast it as the result of years of hard work “struggling as entrepreneurs,” saying it took him five years to even see a paycheck from the venture. A company spokesperson did not respond to questions about the company’s profits from controversial fundraisers.
Wells dismissed criticism of GiveSendGo’s decision to host controversial and extremist right-wing causes, including from religious groups who say it runs counter to the company’s stated Christian values, as “complete nonsense.”
“It’s not the place of a Christian to rob people of freedom,” Wells told TIME. “Jesus was actually called a friend of sinners.”
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GiveSendGo, which bills itself as the “#1 Free Christian Crowdfunding Site,” is a for-profit company that operates on a “voluntary donation model,” Wells says. When users give to a cause through the platform, the site asks them to add a “generous gift,” and automatically includes an extra 10% as a default tip. You can remove the 10% tip from GiveSendGo manually by following two additional steps, and then entering zero.
Numerous users provided tips to GiveSendGo, thanking it for their support in the Canadian protests.Many comments have been submitted along with donations for the trucker convoy. Many people claimed that they had doubled or tripled their donations since GoFundMe stopped the campaign. “I give this gift to support Freedom and an extra gift to support GiveSendGo because they are not Totalitarian like the Big Tech platform that just turned their backs on our Freedom Truckers,” wrote one donor, who gave a 20% gift to the platform.
“We’re a business and we’re trying to provide a service,” Wells says. The recent attention, he adds, has “really put us in a position where we can be a leader in this space.”
GiveSendGo has been launched InHeather Wilson and Wells created the site in 2015 as a means to fund mission trips, health care for poor families and other charities. The devout Christians promoted the site as a “unique social crowdfunding platform for those living out the heartbeat of God.”
This site features both buttons to make financial donations and prayers. “While most other crowdfunding websites charge a minimum of 5%, we believe so much in your missions projects that we have decided to take a step of faith and not take any fees for ourselves,” the site states. Wells, who says he previously served as a cryptology technician in the U.S. Navy, told TIME the first years of the venture were “very difficult” as the site struggled to gain traction.
GiveSendGo was launched in August 2020 when the organization hosted a fundraising event for Rittenhouse’s legal defense. Rittenhouse is an 18-year old who shot and killed two people during protests in Kenosha. “We were like, ‘Oh, my goodness, what should we do here?’” Wilson told the Washington Times last July. “I mean, we were primarily a place for mission trips and puppy dogs.”
The controversial operation of a fundraiser linked to a case racially charged in national spotlight was far more profitable than smaller-dollar fundraising for local churches or medical expenses as GiveSendGo did in the past. The site itself appears to have received more than $40,000 in donations for hosting Rittenhouse’s fundraiser, which raised $631,000, according to TIME’s analysis of the leaked data.
Since then, GiveSendGo has leaned into controversy, gaining hundreds of thousands of new donors by positioning themselves as an alternative to “authoritarian Big Tech” companies. Wells continues to describe GiveSendGo’s nonpartisan nature. “We’re not siding with one political ideology over the other,” he says. According to TIME’s analysis of data leaked to TIME, Daniel Hosterman, an analyst in Durham who is focused on extremist movements, nearly 75% of all funds for the 74 GiveSendGo programs that brought in over $100,000 went to controversial right-wing causes.
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Seit dem Rittenhouse-Fundraiser, has the GiveSendGo platform has hosted fundraisers for “whistleblowers” who spread COVID-19 and anti-vaccine disinformation, efforts to investigate alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election, and the legal defense of Jan. 6 rioters and members of the Proud Boys extremist group. You can also use it to raise money for QAnon, QAnon organizations and InfoWars right-wing conspiracy website. GiveSendGo is also being used for more than a dozen fundraisers tied to the American “Freedom Convoy” that is scheduled to end its cross-country journey in Washington, D.C. on March 5.
The site’s terms note that users “are not permitted to create a Campaign to raise funds for illegal activities, to cause harm to people or property, or to scam others.” Wells says there are only two causes for which he and his sister have determined they would bar fundraising campaigns from their platform for “doing harm”: fundraisers for abortions, and fundraising for transition-related surgeries for teenagers who are transgender.
Eleven of the fundraisers reviewed by TIME also featured a checked box where users agreed to “Subscribe to Project Veritas,” a right-wing activist group which frequently fundraises on GiveSendGo. Wells claims Project Veritas reached to the platform to request an opt-in for the collection of email addresses. The site accepted Wells’ request.
Some Christian groups have reacted negatively to this. “GiveSendGo has clearly abandoned its original mission of ‘funding hope,’ instead becoming a tool for the Christian nationalist purveyors of hatred, disinformation, and political violence,” says Rev. Nathan Empsall, the executive director of Faithful America, a national Christian advocacy organization which launched a petition signed by 34,000 people condemning GiveSendGo’s hosting of extremist fundraisers. “As Christians, we are called to stand against authoritarianism and white supremacy, not give them a platform.”
GiveSendGo’s founders have continued to portray the site as a nonpartisan, Christian, charitably minded venture. Promotional videos posted over the past year have showcased small fundraisers for missionaries, pets, or sick people in need with the tagline “helping families smile again.” Wells says the site’s mission is “sharing the hope of Jesus” and “God using our platform to be the vehicle for bringing freedom back to the tech space.”
Yet in a recent interview with Breitbart, he explicitly connected the platform’s success to the adoption of controversial right-wing causes, citing the “massive growth” it experienced “when we allowed Kyle Rittenhouse to use our platform to fundraise when no one else would.”
In recent weeks, Wells says, the site saw a 1000% increase in users as they promoted the Canadian truckers’ protest. GiveSendGo is hiring “as fast as we can” to grow the platform, he says. “This is the problem that the left never understands,” he adds. “They attack this way and it only makes us stronger, it only makes us better, it only gets our name out there further.”
A Canadian court issued an injunction on Feb. 10 preventing access to GiveSendGo donations for Canadian truckers who occupy Ottawa. The company has assured donors that it is working on finding “the most effective legal ways to continue funds flowing” and pleaded with them not to ask for refunds. “We routed those campaigns to accounts here in the U.S. so that they’re outside the reach of the Canadian government,” Wells told TIME, describing it as a “somewhat delicate process” as the company assesses its legal options.
In the meantime, the site has also promoted its own fundraiser, titled “Fund GSG,” on social media. “When we started GiveSendGo back in 2015 little did we know what God had in store,” the company says in the description, asking for donations and prayers. “Mission trips, adoptions, some medical fundraising is where we thought we would find ourselves. Never did we imagine where God would take us.” It’s the only fundraiser on the site that does not show the total amount of money raised.
