Comments on: Critique of Kickstarter as a Scam https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/critique-of-kickstarter-as-a-scam/2012/02/26 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:39:36 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Reow https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/critique-of-kickstarter-as-a-scam/2012/02/26/comment-page-1#comment-491256 Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:39:36 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=22606#comment-491256 Kickstarter is a scam, but for entirely different reasons to what you describe. I’ve been involved in the funding of over 30 projects, over the past two years. All have promised tangible rewards (merchandise, program licences, etc), many of the deadlines for delivery have come and gone without acknowledgement from the project initiators. A number of them refuse to respond to communications, others keep pushing the deadline for delivery out by “a few months” or “a year”. Kickstarter themselves refuse to answer questions relating to this, and CC companies refuse to reimburse because of the time between transaction and realization that you’ve been defrauded. These aren’t small projects either – many of them were in the $10k-$1m funding range.

Obviously, once I realized the site was a scam, I stopped backing projects – that doesn’t help me recover the $3k-odd that I’ve already flushed supporting these con artists. I doubt that anyone who uses the site is actually legit, and neither Kickstarter nor Amazon gaf as they take their 5% off the top, so it’s just a cash cow for them. I’ve reported the site to the ACCC, but they have no power to investigate/help as the companies are American.

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