Dear Greater Dance Community,

For those of you who do not know, I started HARKALIVE during the pandemic in 2020. I was alone in my home. The world had gone into lockdown. We were in shock. We were lonely. Like many of you, I missed the one thing that kept me going: Israeli Dancing. What started as a small hobby streaming on Facebook, quickly became a full-time job providing a safe community and space for all of us to connect and continue dancing. Wherever. Whenever. Together.

We fostered and grew a community that was there for each other during the darkest of times, and continues to be together. One of the things I’m most proud of this project for is providing work, paid work, to dozens of teachers from all over the world, bringing new faces to the dance floor, and trying to do something new, in the best way possible, correctly, and with dignity and integrity.

UNFORTUNATELY, despite putting in good faith and effort, last month, Harkalive fell victim to a cyber attack.

Through one of our platforms, scammers attacked using a form of credit card manipulation that resulted in thousands of fraudulent transactions by fake customers to fake teachers. The scammers bought and sold fake services, then took this money while at the same time filing for refunds and disputes, leaving me with thousands of refunds to make with money that was never actually received, which then generated TENS OF THOUSANDS in monetary losses that I have had to refund personally from my own life savings.

After deep and extensive research, it appears this is something that happens more commonly than expected, and it is extremely difficult to deal with due to scammers acting like real people, using other people’s, possibly stolen, cards to generate sales, and then taking this money for themselves, while living in remote parts of the world or using resources and tools to mask their identity or location.

The attack was fairly short lived, but by the time we were able to shut down all payment processes, the damage had already been done. Thousands of micro-transactions resulted in tens of thousands of dollars that never came into my account, but still needed to be refunded.

Additionally:

We have taken all the necessary steps to shut this down and prevent it from happening again, as well as reported this crime to the National Fraud & Cyber Crime Reporting Centre in the UK.

I had hoped it would not come to this, but I have had to pay for all of this out of my own pocket.

It is for this reason, dear community, that I reluctantly ask for your support.

After so many years of putting our heart and souls into this, we are honestly left with nothing from it other than tremendous debt. We will continue to do everything we can to support the dance community at large, but today I need your help to recover the horrific losses of this attack.

Thank you, as always, for your love and support.

Sincerely,

Ilai Szpiezak & The Harkalive Team