Hi Sir DeMarco ,

We have sudden and difficult news to deliver. After several rocky months of trying to get WishTender fully back up and running, we will be shutting down, with a heavy heart.

WHAT HAPPENED

It has been an immense struggle with ups and mostly downs since we were kicked off of Stripe. Few services compare. We stayed in beta to try to solve issues such as backup processors shutting down, functional payment issues, compliance issues, and limiting bad actors. However, in the last few days, WishTender has been targeted by card testing. The card testers attacked without trying to profit financially. This is highly unusual. Most card testers want to make money. This tells us the attacker’s motive was to irreparably harm WishTender. Unfortunately, the attacks happened while we were more susceptible, and our resources and efforts to combat the attacks were not good enough.

Our new payment orchestration fraud tools struggled to detect the stolen cards. We kept adding new measures, but the testers found a way around. We finally thought we had it figured out. But it was too late. First, it caused issues with Visa that we felt we could work through but we were informed it created an existential issue for all of our payments. As hard as we tried, we could not solve this with the resources we had at our disposal. We feel our resources are too thin to keep going. We have never had investors. It’s only been us and our team trying to make things work.

A WORD FROM DASH

I hope to speak more openly soon about everything that transpired over our journey. We need some time to handle what is going on.

I am beyond saddened that WishTender is done, but I truly enjoyed building a product that helped the adult creator community for the short time that it did. We launched almost exactly 3 years ago as the first cash wishlist, and your input helped us improve this concept over time. I know so many of you by name and found great joy in joining the community. I sincerely hope to keep in touch with the users who helped us build.

I will miss the glory days of Friday Findom memes, Steve the Spider, and the hilarious comments you posted on all our tweets. I will miss the bizarre copycats that popped up and accidentally left the name “WishTender” in their copy and how you all made fun of them. I will miss your impressive ability to get gifts from people who hardly knew you just by sending them a picture of your middle finger.

So many of you helped us build WishTender into what it became. I’m hopeful that the changes we made in the industry will continue to inspire other companies to put creators first. But I also have learned why this is rare. It’s a huge challenge. Ultimately, we missed the mark, too. This is a harsh industry. From financial discrimination to bad actors and lack of tools and funding, I completely understand why it is so rare to build as openly and fairly as we strived to do. It became harder for us over time.

WHAT’S NEXT

We are working with our payment partners to release payouts for the wishers who participate in the beta program. For users who did not participate in our beta program, there is no need for you to take any action. Again, we hope to share more about everything that transpired, but for the moment we will be focused on finalizing payouts for the beta testers. Thank you for being a part of WishTender’s community.

If you have any questions, use our support chat on the site or contact us at support@wishtender.com