When Kickstarter Goes Wrong | Hacker News Reader

When Kickstarter Goes Wrong

betabeat.com

60 pointslarrys29 comments

It is really hard to separate naivete from greed and from general cluelessness in situations like this and even with a little weirdness on the part of the guy who started the Kickstarter project we're still talking about a situation where nobody actually lost any money.

Maybe he sat down one day and thought: "Hey, I'd like to rip people off by making up a fraudulent wi-fi enabled power socket." but to me it seems more likely that he had an idea kicking around for a while and then found Kickstarter and thought "Hey, I bet I can make this for $20 a unit" only to find out that was unrealistic and he got freaked out by the situation.

Maybe I'm the one that is naive but in a situation where nobody was actually harmed and there is at least some question of the culpability of the "suspect", maybe we shouldn't rush to judge them.

I tend to favor the non-malice-based explanation too, but in this case it's looking bad. The article documents a couple of lies (patent pending, etc.), the person doesn't seem to exist at all, and he also magically transformed into some chick at the end. Looks like a scam got snuffed.

If it weren't a scam, KickStarter would probably say so vociferously too.

I don't think that is necessarily true ... Kickstart themselves have said that they don't closely follow each project and it is up to the backers to decide whether they feel it is worth their money or not.

The whole idea of Kickstarter is to allow family and friends to help you with your idea and to spread that idea by word of mouth, but it provides a great incentive to make sure that you do complete the project and make good on your promises, because your friends and family are going to be there asking about it in real life. That is a little bit more difficult to do online, when it is so easy to fake who you are.

Nothing went wrong. Everything worked exactly as it is supposed to.

He put it out there to see if there was interest. There was. He did more research. He realized he couldn't succeed. He didn't take any money.

There's no fraud, no intent to deceive or steal. Everything is on the up-and-up except for one thing:

There are people calling for his blood simply because they are jealous or disappointed. He was aiming to do something they couldn't, so they started calling him a fraud. And when he admits he really couldn't, and hasn't taken any money, people continue to call him a fraud.

It's ridiculous. I'm sick of people treating people as guilty before there's any proof whatsoever.

From the update posts, it looks like they're still trying to take money from this - just outside of Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is not an investment. It's a donation based on a story and a non-legally binding promise.

If you treat it as more than that you are deluding yourself.

Skipping over the need for an electrician to install the things, good luck building a wifi-controlled wall outlet in small quantity for $20. A cheap solid-state relay is already going to run you at least $5 in 1ku quantity. Then add the radio and its power circuit and the control logic and do at least a tiny bit of safety testing.

Here's another one that was really suspicious, mainly because of listed specs vs. package vs. power. They also didn't have a prototype or any detailed info to support the feasibility of their renders.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zioneyez/eyeztm-by-zione...

Heck, good luck making an effective wall-socket with a cheap solid-state relay at all! Waste power will add up fast, and may even heat up fast!

Usually need a 2 or 3 cm square heatsink. But fat lot of good that will do once you enclose it in a metal box and stick it in a wall.

Think 'dimmer+wifi radio' for the parts pricing. So whatever it is that you come up with it is never going to be cheaper than a dimmer + the price of a wifi radio plus some mark-up.

How are those glasses even possible?!

I think of kickstarter as a tool for putting my money where my mouth is.

BTW, in my experience KS works really well. Of course I use to only back people with experience making what they want to do, people that have prototypes already designed and functional that only needs to sell a mass produced version.

As they say: "real artist ship", so the first thing people do is look for proofs that a maker is really a maker and not a snake oil salesman.

I see Kickstarter as a sort of gamble, am I willing to part ways with my money and never see it again.

I hope off course that everything goes off without a hitch and I do get what I paid for and helped the inventor achieve his/her dreams. There are worse things I could be spending money on ...

I too was a backer of the TechSync project, mainly because I have thought of, laid out PCB designs and written software to do something similar using 900 Mhz transceivers and my BOM at the moment comes out to $60 or so... I wanted to see how Steve Washington and Co could do it for less, and that was worth the $20 gamble.

I suggest we will soon see an airBNB style situation developing with kickstarter. Right now, kickstarter is still hipster, fairly new, nice crowd, soon that will change and it's entire proposition will be taken advantage of by those who just want the money. Enjoy it while you can.

AirBnB is in worse situation because few people are involved. On Kickstarter there are at least hundreds of people involved in average project so chances that someone will notice fraud are much higher.

Agree. kickstarter will play this as "nothing to see here move along".

But the truth is several well publicized frauds that happen could would be great publicity for the site. Especially something that lands on the nightly news or Nytimes.

Like stories of selling body parts on ebay that the media liked to pick up.

Does anyone know whether, if you were to create a fake project and get it funded then just walk away with the cash, there would be any legal action from KickStarter themselves, and/or the potential for legal action from one or more of the backers?

I figure that, because of the "it's not a guarantee that the person(s) you back will succeed", it ought to be possible to successfully come across as a legitimate person who did his best, spent all the funds on the project and ended up not managing to actually finish it.

I suppose it would depend if any fraud has been committed.

I know very little about body language, but one thing that has stuck in my mind is that people tend to look away from you and usually into the corner of the room when they are lying.

Watching the video, his eyes go away from the camera when he is making many claims including:

"fantastic team"

"the system is up and going in just a matter of minutes"

"it does it pretty accurately"

I've always thought this was an old wives tale--Someone looking away isn't a reliable indicator that someone is lying and someone looking you in the eye and saying something with seeming authenticity is not enough to verify truth (Watch a politician lie or have to back pedal and see if they look anywhere but directly at the camera--"I did not have sexual relations with that woman"...) I think it's more accurate that not looking someone in the eye suggests nervousness, so the question becomes are they nervous because they're lying or nervous because they're socially awkward in general or ...

For this particular story though, seems like the facts don't add up, I'd be pretty hesitant to give this guy money... Although kickstarter seems pretty safe now, people will take advantage, and I'm interested to see if things like kickstarter, airbnb, bitcoin, etc. will be capable of self-regulation in the long run. I give it 50/50.

Used as only one point of data you're right it's not reliable. False negatives and false positives.

But used in conjunction with other info that has been collected it certainly adds to the picture in coming to a conclusion.

Also keep in mind that in this particular case he was speaking to a camera not a person.

I do this trick with people to try to guess their name. I have them name three possible names with one the real name. If you do that enough you will begin to pick up on mannerisms when someone is saying their real name vs. a made up name. Of course it only normally works the first time and never if they know how to avoid tipping me off.

I think it's hard to blame the incidence of fraud, which is as old as humankind, on Kickstarter.

i thought it was great that Amanda Palmer and her new multi millionaire husband, Neil Gaiman (19 million)used kickstarter to fund their tour.

Is Neil Gaiman really that wealthy? I mean, obviously he's well off because his book sell so well, but even Obama didn't make 19 million off his books.

He gets movie royalties, too.

This is completely off topic, but, as far as I can tell they used Kickstarter in place of ticket sales.

Is that not the case?

Let me add some background to this and why I posted the original link the other day (which got no interest interestingly enough which is a discussion in itself). (And yes I called it fraud in the headline I should have said "could have been fraud")

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3001326

I had contacted Washington back in July and asked the following question:

"Can I get a link to your credentials or your linkedin page? I'm ready to support this I'd just like to know more about your qualifications to do this particular project. Thanks."

I didn't hear back so 4 days later I wrote again with the same exact question.

The response I received was:

"Thank you for your interest in our project. However, at this time, I am not a Linkedin user. I'm honestly not a fan of the site."

To me (and this is important) given lack of other information on this project this was a red flag.

The issue to me though with kickstarter is not this specific case and what Washington intended to do. He could have taken the money with good intentions to build the device and simply failed. And people would be out whatever money they put in. That's why I wrote to ask questions. Its obvious though that the "public" didn't think the same way and gave him money.

Alternatively the fact is that it would have been fairly easy for Washington to do all the right things, collect money, and make off with that money very easily. Right things that might have even fooled me. It's not hard to come up with an identity. On linkedin as anyone who uses it now knows you can easily put up credentials and get people to be your contacts. You can easily put up a site you could even put up a site and make it appear that you run or work at an actual company. You could simply copy the website of a legitimate engineering company and change a few names and identifying information and make a convincing site.

Now nothing about this is new of course you could have done this before kickstarter and defrauded people.

It's just easier now. Part of the friction is gone. Kickstarter makes it easy to throw something out there and collect money. Collect a lot of money. We're not talking selling something on ebay with buyer protection and karma.

Anyone else noticed the irony in "419 backers"?

Exactly what I wanted to comment on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com