A notorious Canadian hacker who has claimed credit for hacking far-right social networks Gab and Parler now says he’s responsible for hacking Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo and leaking the details of all its campaigns and everyone who donated to them.
Now, he’s facing death threats from those who support the “freedom convoy.”
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In a livestream on his TikTok channel, Aubrey Cottle, known online as Kirtaner, admitted he was the hacker who had taken GiveSendGo’s website offline and redirected it to a website with the URL GiveSendGone.wtf, where visitors were greeted with a video from the Disney film “Frozen.”
Cottle, who was among the founding members of the hacktivist group Anonymous, also admitted to leaking the data from the Freedom Convoy 2022 campaign, which included the personal details of over 92,000 donors.
“Yes, I doxxed the truckers, I did it, it was me, I hacked GiveSendGo baby, and I’d do it again,” Cottle screamed on the TikTok livestream. “I’d do it a hundred times. I did it. I did it. Come at me. What are you going to do, what are you going to do to me, ha?”
While the TikTok livestream was the first time he publicly admitted hacking GiveSendGo, Cottle hasn’t been shy about his plans.
In a TikTok video posted on Feb. 7, a week before the site was hacked, Cottle said: “It’d be a real shame if something were to happen to GiveSendGo,” Cottle said. For the last week, he’s openly commented on his part in the hack on his Reddit account.
And it appears that the operators of the Freedom Convoy 2022 campaign were at least aware of the threat Cottle posed, writing a reference to him in a campaign update on the GiveSendGo website last week.
In his livestream on Wednesday, Cottle listed his previous accomplishments.
“I hacked Epic hosting, I hacked Parler, I hacked Gab, I hacked Truth Social, I hacked GiveSendGo, I don’t care,” Cottle added. “I’m literally a famous fucking cyberterrorist, and you think that you can scare me?”
In an interview he gave to the Guardian on Tuesday in which he wasn’t named, Cottle explained why he hacked the crowdfunding site.
“[Canada is] not safe from foreign political manipulation. You see a huge amount of money that isn’t even coming from Canada—that’s plain as day,” the hacker said.
The data, reviewed by VICE News, shows that the majority of donors came from the U.S., though donations from Canada amounted to more money.
Even before he took credit for the action, Cottle’s name had begun circulating on Telegram groups linked to the “freedom convoy,” and soon his name, phone number, email address, and home address were being shared widely on these channels—though everything aside from his home address was already freely available on his website.
Under one post about Cottle’s actions, a member of the “Truckers for Freedom” Telegram group wrote: “Hang them all! Communists!”
On his Discord channel, Cottle shared a message he had received after the TikTok video that urged him to take his own life. “The best possible scenario is to stop existing altogether,” the unidentified sender wrote. Cottle also posted a deeply antisemitic message he received, featuring swastikas.
One user watching Cottle’s TikTok also posted the following message on the livestream: “We gon make it look like an overdose,” according to a screenshot posted on the Discord channel. Other messages targeted Cottle’s son.
On Tuesday, the details of GiveSendGo’s entire campaign history as well as details of every person who ever made a donation there were leaked online. GiveSendGo did not respond to VICE News’ request for comment about the latest leak, but the company’s CEO did speak to Fox News.
“This is illegal, and these people should be going to jail,” Jacob Wells said. “The FBI, I mean, it’s surprising that we haven’t heard from any investigative services. We will be reaching out ourselves to just see that there’s some investigation into this. This is completely unacceptable.”
But Cottle, who did not immediately respond to several messages from VICE News, does not seem to be worried about the physical or legal threats he’s facing for his alleged part in the hack.
“It was worth it,” he told viewers on his TikTok livestream on Wednesday. “And if I die, it was even more worth it.”
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