On Feb. 13, the names and personal details of upwards of 100,000 individuals who donated to GiveSendGo in support of the Freedom Convoy were stolen and the data was published by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDosSecrets) , an organisation founded in 2018 that claims it’s a non-profit whistleblower.
The mainstream media were quick to exploit the leaked data framing the donors as foreign entities working to undermine the Canadian government and even went as far as to contact donors directly to ask about their motivations for donating. It has since been revealed that the majority of donors to the campaign were Canadian followed by citizens of the United States.
A self-proclaimed hacker named Aubrey Cottle has posted a disturbing video online claiming to be the one responsible for breaching GiveSendGo’s servers and stealing the data.
Writhing and screaming into the camera Cottle says, “Nothing scares me, nothing. Yes, I doxxed the truckers! I did it! It was me! I hacked GiveSendGo baby!”
The hack and subsequent leaking of the data was but one of several attacks on the trucker’s finances. Prior to the hack, Ontario Premier, Doug Ford, obtained a court order in an attempt to freeze the funds in the GiveSendGo campaign however it appeared to have little effect.
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This was after GoFundMe cancelled the trucker’s original crowdfunding campaign purportedly at the behest of the Canadian government.
Currently the GiveSendGo campaign is still open and continues to receive donations. The campaign has raised in excess of US$9.7 million.
If Cottle’s claims are true that would indicate that he was the one who wrote and posted the manifesto on GiveSendGo’s website. The reasoning behind the hack Cottle gave was that “Givesendgo has 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.”
Cottle, a Canadian citizen, claims he is the alleged founder of the hacktivist collective, Anonymous.
Cottle has been able to operate with impunity purportedly due to his connections with the intelligence apparatuses in both the U.S. and Canada.
Cottle claims to have “often…dealt with feds” such as the FBI and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “His activities include running ‘child porn honeypot operations’ involving multiple sites that ‘still give [him] nightmares,’” The GrayZone reported.
On Jan. 20, 2017 Cottle tweeted, “I’ve done work for the fbi before and i give zero [expletive].”
He has boasted in the past that he has been “lucky” to have been granted “the blessing of alphabet agencies,” in the pursuit of his work. The term “alphabet agencies” is slang for intelligence services.
In July 2021, journalist Barret Brown, “released documents revealing how the hacker [Cottle] had collaborated with notorious neo-Nazi cyber-activist ‘weev’ to conduct major hacks that could be blamed on Antifa,” The GrayZone reported.
Cottle has praised the Canadian government for invoking the Emergencies Act, taking to Twitter to say, “THEY F***ED AROUND AND FOUND OUT.” His twitter account has since been locked and the video he defaced the GiveSendGo website with has been removed from YouTube due to “YouTube’s policy on harassment and bullying.”
