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Online Communities Bust Kickstarter Scam
from the well-done dept
Amidst all the recent talk of just how successful Kickstarter has been as a platform for creators raising money, some people have suggested that the company may run into problems down the road because it seems ripe for fraud. Of course, most things are ripe for fraud in one way or another, so Kickstarter isn't exactly special in that regard—and when fraud does happen, people will fight it just like they do anywhere else.
At least, that was certainly the case with a recent video game project on Kickstarter that turned out to be fake. As BetaBeat reports, the crowdsourcing scam was exposed by a crowdsourced investigation:
... a campaign for an action video game, MYTHIC: The Story Of Gods and Men, has just been busted by forum users at Reddit, SomethingAwful and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The creators claimed to be an independent studio, “Little Monster Productions,” of 12 industry veterans in Hollywood. “Our team has done a significant amount of work on the World of Warcraft series as well as Diablo 2 and the original Starcraft,” says the project page.
Bullshit, said the Internet. Turns out the art was cribbed, the text for backer rewards was copied and pasted from another Kickstarter project, and even the office photos were from another game studio, Burton Design Group.
When people brought their accusations to the Kickstarter comments, the developers made a few weak attempts at deflection then quietly shut down having raised just under $5,000 (far short of their goal, so that money won't actually be released). With Kickstarter gaining more attention every day, we're sure to see more attempts at scams—and maybe even some successes—but with a savvy community that polices itself like this, the scammers face an uphill battle.
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Ask Wall Street.
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"Kickstarter has gotten so big now that it's potential for fraud and abuse is massive. As such, we've decided to dismantle it in favor of something much smaller and easier to manage."
Followed by a small hand shooting up in the back of the assembled masses, saying, "Um, can we do that to you, then?"
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Thank you.
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But then, I'm selling bits of the Golden Gate Bridge and real pixie dust for only $199.95.
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Well know,
Except, ya know, I ♥ humans, because they do stuff like this.
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Crowd Policing
Wouldn't it be nice if Wall Street were much more transparent so the Wall Street, Bankers, Investors etc could police themselves and stop the fraud.
I believe that both the 99% crowd and the 1% crowd are capable of policing fraud.
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Re: Crowd Policing
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Re: Re: Crowd Policing
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Re: Crowd Policing
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I see where you're going with this... who knows, so let's ban Kickstarter?
In other news, 419 letter scams were stopped... next time? Who knows? Let's ban email in advance so it can't happen...
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Tens of thousands of internet savvy people is about the best fraud preventative in existence.
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Great that they caught this scam, and there will be many more and slicker ones for sure ... but at least Kickstarter and their supporters seem to be much further ahead of the learning curve than big business and the government!
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Crowd Policing
I would like to see KickStarter be proactive and allow the crowd to be more involved in authenticity due diligence throughout the project. They could add a "Like" button with a bar graph:showing the number of viewers, number of likes and dislikes with a Twitter message field of 160 characters to state the reason why the like or dislike to the project organizer with the option to send as a tweet and the organizers to respond.
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Re: Crowd Policing
You sir have found a great way to make it harder to start up.
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Fraud Policing
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I'll just chalk this one down to the usual scare tactics, used by people finding they can no longer use the "it will never work" complaints so they have to spend FUD instead...
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if you want to know more about me and see a picture of me google: art scam anna johnson
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Fraud is starting to Kick at Kickstarter
When you contact Kickstarter, they say there is nothing they can do. Amazon Payments, who processes the payments, gives no better response. And because he dragged it out over 90 days, we have no recourse through our credit card companies. My suggestion for future backers is don't let it go more than 30-45 days before using your credit card company's fraud protection.
Many of the backers of the project are now beginning to contact local and federal prosecutors to see what can be done about this. BEWARE!
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