You may remember that last month, we reported that the first legal action against a crowdfunded project ended with the state of Washington imposing $54,851 in restitution, civil penalties, and the attorney general’s costs and fees on the company, based on the number of backers who lived in Washington state at the time of the Kickstarter campaign. Now there’s a complication: the company is actually starting to ship stuff. [More]
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WA State Attorney General Orders Non-Delivering Kickstarter Campaign To Pay Up
By 7.27.15
Last year, the Washington state attorney general tried something that no government had ever tried before: it sued the people behind a Kickstarter campaign that never shipped the merchandise that it promised. Justice moves slowly, but that case has finally been settled, with the company that failed to send Asylum horror-themed playing cards being ordered to pay a total of $54,851 in restitution, civil penalties, and the attorney general’s costs and fees. [More]
FTC Announces First-Ever Settlement Over A Failed Crowdfunded Project
By 6.11.15
Today is an important date in the histories of both consumer protection and crowdfunding: For the first time, the Federal Trade Commission took legal action against someone who used Kickstarter to fund a project that they didn’t produce. That’s the good news. The bad news is that since the man behind the scheme has no money to distribute to backers, the settlement doesn’t actually do anything for people who backed The Doom That Came To Atlantic City. [More]
Watch Company Collects $1 Million On Kickstarter, Spends It All, Then Hides
By 5.22.15
Kickstarter is not, and never has been, a store. Yet companies that use the platform to fund the production of a new product are eventually supposed to, um, make that product. Backers who contributed more than a million dollars to produce thin e-ink watches want answers from the company that promised these watches, and they aren’t satisfied with “we’re broke” as an answer. [More]
Pebble Promises They’ll Ship Kickstarter Watches Before Stocking Best Buy This Time
By 2.24.15
The original Pebble smartwatch campaign in 2012 was a fabulous success, collecting $10.3 million dollars in Kickstarter pledges. It produced a real product that shipped, but not after some backers were disappointed when the company stocked Best Buy’s shelves before sending out watches to Kickstarter backers that had been paid for up to a year earlier. In its new campaign to launch a color watch, Pebble promises: that will not happen again. [More]
Kickstarter Ditches Amazon As Payment Processor, Switches To Stripe
By 1.6.15
If you’ve been avoiding backing interesting projects on Kickstarter because you didn’t want to deal with Amazon Payments or log in to two accounts to pledge a couple of bucks for some potato salad, your wait is over: Kickstarter is breaking up with Amazon and switching to a different payments processor, Stripe. [More]
LinkWallet Doesn’t Ship Wallets, Promises Refunds By December 2015
By 12.23.14
Back in early September, Consumerist featured the LinkWallet, an ultra-thin, smartphone-connected wallets funded through Kickstarter that caught backers’ imaginations and $59,000 of their money. There were several similar wallets available around then, but what distinguished the LinkWallet was the creators’ apparent inability to ship wallets. LinkWallet had assured everyone that the wallets would ship by the end of 2014: how’s that going? [More]
Know Your Crowdfunding Platforms: Missions, Fees, And Rules
By 9.30.14
You have an idea, or you have an urgent financial need, and you want to turn to the Internet to make funding happen. Or let’s say some acquaintance is asking for money on Facebook for what seems like a cool project or worthy cause, but you wonder: what the heck is an “indie go go?” Why is the site itself asking me for a donation, too? [More]
Guy Who Crowdfunded $55,000 To Make Potato Salad Is Throwing A Huge Potato Party For Charity
By 9.25.14
Back when the guy known now as Kickstarter Potato Salad Guy raised about $55,000 for his first-ever attempt at making potato salad, everyone was wondering how in the heck you could possibly make that much potato salad to fulfill rewards for his backers. And now he’s got the answer — he’s going to throw a massive potato party, complete with potato sack races, food vendors and yes, potato salad, all for charity. [More]
Kickstarter: Project Backers Must Get Rewards (But Leave Us Out Of It)
By 9.19.14
When you pledge your money to a Kickstarter project, you do so knowing that you won’t actually be charged unless the project reaches its funding goal. While that protects against an unfundable project from running off with your money, what about those projects that reached their goal but still don’t deliver the promised rewards? [More]
Linkwallet Emerges, Says Wallets Will Ship By End Of 2014
By 9.5.14
Since backing a hardware project on a crowdfunded site feels like shopping, people get annoyed when the things they “bought” don’t show up when expected. Like the Ping Wallet, which we featured here on the site yesterday. A year after raising $59,000, the smart wallet is the subject of a Kickstarter backer revolt. However, the company’s CEO has re-emerged and says that the delays are just because he wants to send backers a wallet that doesn’t suck. [More]
Ping Wallet Collects $59,000 On Kickstarter, Disappears
By 9.4.14
The Ping Wallet (later renamed Linkwallet) seemed like a boon to the absent-minded consumer. It was part of the super-slim smart wallet boom on Kickstarter, and it would sync to a user’s smartphone with Bluetooth and send reminders to put payment cards away, and even remind users if they tried to leave their wallet at home. Sounds like a great idea, and maybe it would be if the project creators hadn’t vanished a few months ago, shipping no wallets and not answering their messages. Update: we’re sure this has nothing whatsoever to do with this article, but the management of Linkwallet have re-appeared and say the wallets will be in backers’ pockets by the end of 2014. [More]
Is It Cool To Make Mutual Kickstarter Pledge Agreements With Other Campaigns?
By 9.3.14
Reader Maxim is running a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter right now to print up some really cool playing cards. Yet he didn’t contact us to ask us to write about his project: we don’t normally post about items in the crowdfunding phase, anyway. He was concerned about a message he received from another Kickstarter campaign creator, who was asking him to swap pledges to artificially inflate each other’s totals. [More]
Kickstarter Suspends Alleged AirBNB Squatter’s Second Game Campaign
By 7.31.14
In Palm Springs, California, a man booked a vacation condominium for 44 days, saying that he would be in town on a business trip. After 30 days, he gained rights as a tenant under California law, and refused to pay rent or to leave. When the story broke, he was discovered to be an indie game developer who has failed to deliver a Kickstarter-funded project. That’s when the justice of the sharing economy kicked in. Kind of. [More]
AirBNB Squatter’s Kickstarter Backers Revolt After “Would Squat Again” Comment
By 7.28.14
No one can prove with 100% certainty that the person who left a glib comment on the Kickstarter page for the game Confederate Express was Maksym Pashanin, game creator and alleged AirBNB squatter. However, the comment did prompt backers to declare the project a “scam” and demand refunds. [More]
AirBNB Squatter May Be Developer Of Overdue Kickstarter-Funded Game
By 7.25.14
The man occupying a vacation condominium in Palm Springs, California without paying rent was not thrilled that his new landlord planned to cut off the electricity. He said that it would affect his work, which he does from home and earns $1,000 to $7,000 per day. What kind of work? Developing video games, apparently. [More]
Smartest Person Alive Invents Gadget That Fills & Ties 37 Water Balloons At Once
By 7.24.14
On the one hand, who wouldn’t want to be sitting pretty in a backyard fort with hundreds of water balloons that took only minutes to fill and tied themselves. On the other hand — no, I can’t. There is no downside to a device that allows you to fill 37 balloons with water at one time and spares you the time/pain of tying all those slippery little suckers. [More]
Just Because One Guy Has Raised $52K For Potato Salad Doesn’t Mean Your Kickstarter Food Campaign Will Too
By 7.8.14
Oh brother, here we go [cue weary eyeroll]: Now that one guy is up to his ears in pledges for his Kickstarter effort to make potato salad — almost $53,000 at this point, with three weeks left — the Internet has of course, regurgitated a whole bunch of copycat food campaigns. [More]
