Techdirt. Stories filed under "fakes" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "fakes"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Fri, 15 Feb 2013 03:34:32 PST Fake Kickstarter Game Raises Worries About The Platform, But Should It? Timothy Geigner http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130212/09493721951/fake-kickstarter-game-raises-worries-about-platform-should-it.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130212/09493721951/fake-kickstarter-game-raises-worries-about-platform-should-it.shtml noted one such case, in which the internet community outted a fake game's funding attempt, detailing how that community was responsible for getting the project removed from Kickstarter entirely. At the same time, he discussed how fraud can be found in the more traditional arenas, as can failures. But Kickstarter stories like this seem to garner, what is in my estimation, an undue amount of fear over frauds and scams.

So I expect more of the same as we learn of another case of a Kickstarter project claiming false affiliations and making promises it couldn't hope to keep. Dirty Bird Sports, as the group was called, claimed that it was raising funds to put out an NCAA football game for the PS3 and Xbox 360, and claimed to have the backing of several well-known names in the football world, all of which turned out to be false.
Boasting a backing from well-known Atlanta Falcons running back Jamal Anderson, the project claimed that it was hoping to create a competitor to EA's NCAA Football game and only needed the relatively paltry sum of $500,000 to develop a PS3 and Xbox 360 title.
However, many of the 3D models and assets compiled by the group, calling itself "Dirty Bird Sports", were found to have been lifted from sites selling other artists work, a roundup of which can be seen at Kotaku.
While some might freak out over this, that last bit is what's most interesting to me, and is the proper evidence for pushing back against those claiming the sky is falling. Once again, a vibrant internet community has assisted in outing the liars and scammers, proactively preventing any actual financial harm from occurring. While that same community may not end up with a 100% success rate in stopping such cases, I see these instances as an indication of the maturing of the platform and a direct result of the growth of interest in Kickstarter as a whole. As with any other aspect of crowdsourcing, the benefits rise as the size of the crowd increases. That the internet community is so successful in warning the rest of us of these dangers should be taken as a selling point of Kickstarter, not some scary boogeyman.

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]]> crowdsourcing-factchecking http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130212/09493721951 Tue, 18 Jan 2011 05:53:39 PST Match.com Sued Over Dead/Fake Profiles Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110114/09203212668/matchcom-sued-over-deadfake-profiles.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110114/09203212668/matchcom-sued-over-deadfake-profiles.shtml threatened some rivals, saying that the numbers they put out concerning marketing probably couldn't be supported, and ordering them to cease and desist with misleading claims. Of course, all that really did was make a lot of people turn around and look more closely at Match.com's own claims, which seemed only fair. I have no idea if this latest story is a result of some of that scrutiny, but a class action lawsuit has been filed against Match.com by users of the service who claimed that the company was quite misleading with its own stats. Of specific concern is the actual number of users touted by Match, who (the plaintiffs claim) leaves "dead" accounts on the system just so it can boost its numbers. Also, there are claims that many of the profiles are fakes, using images of porn actresses, models, or people from other dating sites (though, if accurate, this could just be the work of spammers, rather than Match itself). Separately, there are claims that just as accounts are about to expire, members get a notice that someone wants to contact them -- but they have to renew their subscription to respond. Except, when they do renew, it turns out that the person who wanted to contact them has disappeared. All that does seem a bit sneaky, if true.

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]]> you-only-need-to-find-one http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110114/09203212668 Mon, 8 Mar 2010 13:33:16 PST Fake Processors, Passing The Blame, Legal Nastygrams And More... Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100308/0126328456.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100308/0126328456.shtml Richard Corsale writes in to let us know about how popular electronics e-commerce site NewEgg apparently received 300 totally fake Intel processors and at least some of them were sold. They're not processors at all. They're just made to look like them from the outside. NewEgg's initial response was to claim that its supplier shipped them demo boxes by accident -- but Intel is claiming that's not true, and the boxes are not official Intel demo boxes, but counterfeit demo boxes. Then, to make the story even odder, many publications reported that NewEgg's supplier for these fake processors was a company called D&H -- and D&H's response to all of these stories is to send out legal nastygrams to anyone reporting on the story and mentioning D&H. Perhaps it's worth giving D&H the benefit of the doubt, but why not just come out and say "hey, it wasn't us," and get NewEgg to confirm or deny who provided the fake processors before sending out a legal threat?

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]]> oh-boy http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100308/0126328456 Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:12:51 PST What Happens If Facebook Thinks You're Not Real? Dennis Yang http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071220/160220.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071220/160220.shtml deletion of fake accounts (aka Fakesters) is sometimes cited as one of the many causes of Friendster's ultimate fall from grace. Initially, Facebook had not been plagued with such problems, since it originally restricted its users to those with an .edu email address. Now that the restriction has been lifted, fake accounts are starting to stream into Facebook, and with that has come the Facebook fake account police. Just last month, Facebook drew the ire of the blogosphere when they deleted Jon Swift's account for using a pseudonym. And now, on Monday, Facebook disabled British politician Steve Webb's account Monday after receiving complaints that he did not exist. Webb has been a member of Parliament for 10 years, and an active member of Facebook for almost a year, amassing 2,500 friends in that time. Though the mishap was corrected after a few hours, it reminds us of the difficulty of determining true identity in an online world. A cursory search for "Britney Spears" yields at least 20 profiles -- if one of these is the true Britney, it is impossible to tell. Or, perhaps Britney is already on Facebook, but under a pseudonym -- in which case, would she get deleted?

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]]> i-am-who-i-am http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20071220/160220