Online again!
We couldn’t believe our eyes. Last Thursday, our team was about to take the next step in our fundraising campaign. The new brochure was ready to be sent. And then: blackout! All of the sudden, our campaign site on Indiegogo went dark. All donors who had contributed several thousands US$ until then, received an automatic email saying they had been reimbursed “either at your request or at the request of the campaign administrator”. I received such a mail as well for my personal donation. Being myself the campaign administrator, I was quite astonished.
Only one hour earlier, Indiegogo had send me a short notice, saying that our campaign was frozen due to “unusual activities”. I tried immediately to log-in with my mail address and password. Not possible! Apparantly, somebody had hacked my personal account and was about to bring down our campaign. The money of our donors was not at risk at any moment. With Indiegogo, no disbursement is possible before the end of the campaign (some two more weeks to go). And even then, there are several security checks that the bank account is actually the right one. The only explanation possible was an attack for political reasons.
But that was only the beginning. I could not neither log-in to my personal account, nor request a “forgotten” password per mail. When I asked for that, the website only replied “We don’t have that email address on file”. However, if I tried to open a new account with that same mail address again, the website said “Email has already been taken”. Definitely, something seems to be wrong with Indiegogo. It goes without saying that all of us bombarded them right away with mails. In a first reaction, they were putting forward some strange excuses, saying that verifications were needed for making sure we were not violating US sanctions against Syria.
Hilarious! To all of us, that sounded like a cheap excuse. Shoot first and ask questions later? In only one hour after we received the first alert of unusual activities, our campaign was down and my account was hacked. Either Indiegogo wanted to conceal a serious security problem (indeed: you can try as many wrong passwords to your account as you want) or somebody messed something up. They had more than two more weeks to clarify these questions- which were all answered in our pitch text and in my personal account. As for the US sanctions, it is obvious that these are not touching humanitarian aid campaigns in Lebanon that are clearly stating that no human rights abuser can be our cooperation partner. Even for operations inside Syria, US OFAC clearly says that humanitarian actions as well as democratisation and human rights projects are entirely legal (cf. this FAQ website of the US Treasury). We found some very clear words to express these points to Indiegogo and to ask them for a clarification about what actually happened. Monday evening, their 2nd response arrived, presenting formal apologies for the confusion and promising clarification before the end of the business day.
Now we are approaching the end of the 2nd business day over there, in sunny California, but we are still waiting for the promised clarifications. We will most certainly keep you informed as soon as they arrived. Fortunately, we did not stand idly by and wait. I am very glad that our new campaign site went online today. Of course, we are lacking now the fancy tools of a crowdfunding site (like these nice progress bars on the front page), but this is also reducing our payment fees to the mere 3% Paypal takes for its services. The security of your donations is even higher now and we will keep you updated every week.
Many thanks for your patience and for your trust! We will proceed with our delayed campaign and we hope we will quickly raise the €30,000 necessary for the opening of our first Peace Centre in Lebanon in February 2013.
All the best, Friedrich