On June 9, Gabe Einhorn took to X to share his dismay at a message he’d received from a potential new hire, who explained he wouldn’t take an interview at VryfID, Einhorn’s real-estate start-up, because he was “not interested in working for a Jew.” Though Einhorn, 24, blocked out the applicant’s name, it wasn’t long before online sleuths registered the culprit as Austin Franco, a 19-year-old Cornell University student, and blasted his name across the internet.
As various CEOs publicly vowed never to hire him, Franco was embraced as a cause célèbre by trolls eager to “tell the truth” about the Jewish people. His newfound fame was followed by newfound fortune: an online fundraiser set up on GiveSendGo to help Franco fend off the “unlawful doxxing” and backlash from his “liberal university.” In the week since, it has raised more than $25,000—a quarter of the fund’s $100,000 goal.
“It was set up really quickly. I thought it was a joke at first, to be honest,” Einhorn told me. He shared his surprise that the fundraiser wasn’t removed by the site. “Shouldn’t they be monitoring what’s going on?”
But this wasn’t the case of a bad apple that slipped through the cracks—it was reviewed and greenlit by GiveSendGo. A case like Franco’s is what distinguishes GiveSendGo from its more timorous crowdfunding counterparts, including GoFundMe, the industry leader, which removes campaigns promoting “intolerance of any kind” and reserves the right to disable any page it deems “unacceptable or objectionable.”
