How fake are these tech raise-money campaigns?
We stopped covering kickstarter and indiegogo a while ago due to anything we covered ending up being a complaint page when the company inevitably delivered late or didn’t respond to requests for ETAs in a timely fashion.
But lately I’ve been seeing all this garbage on Facebook linking me to incredibly low powered projectors, and belts that claim they’ve researched and are not in violation of copyright and they’ll sue you if you point out they are, and the fastest funded project in X category in HISTORY…
They’re all funded to the tune of sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they’ve been out for like two days at some points, and I already own or have reviewed some of the products they’re raising money for and I just sat there wondering how they got $80K in an hour and a half.
So what’s the deal? Are people big enough sheep to think a 200 lumen projector is going to be good anywhere except a cave? Has nobody ever googled “adjustable belt”? Do people think that if a product is funded that it’s worth chipping in?
That last one got me thinking that some trickery is afoot. People do think if something is funded it’s probably been researched.
If you want to be the fastest funded ripoff belt in history, you start your campaign, pledge ridiculous amounts to yourself, claim “the fastest funded garbage in history!”, and when the funding deadline is almost there, you you back out of supporting yourself. No charge it looks like.
Or cancel your credit cards…
When you see these claims and wonder why, I think it’s because they’re backing themselves expecting people to believe that other people supported it, so so should you.
Alternately there could be a huge number of people who generally are exorbitantly wealthy and can’t google “adjustable belt” or type “amazon.com”.
What has been really fun is posting in the advertising of these asking “so what makes over-funding this product make it better than these?” (links to amazon listing of 30+ devices that look exactly the same and have the same specs.
The ads disappear, only to be replaced by a new one a few days later.
