Kickstarter is a HUGE Funded Honeypot for Scammers

I have been reading some interesting things related to Kickstarter lately, disturbing things that have done nothing but make me really distrust the service as being a valid way to make money, at least for the honest person.

Darren and I have discussed Kickstarter on the Ninjalane Podcast and at the time we both agreed that Kickstarter could be a great way to get your project off the ground when funds are limited.  The only cost to you?, when you're project is funded and complete you simply give your backers something in return.  But what if the project starter, after getting their project funded, decided to disappear, leave the country, lose internet access, or simply die?  Well logic tells us that you're not going to get that thing you paid good money for.

Or worse yet you actually get something you backed but turned out to be nothing like what you had expected.  Penny-Arcade explored that notion and one of them ended up dead.

CNN has posted a look into Kickstarter what happens if the project starter doesn't come thru.

But as the popularity of the site, and others like Indiegogo, increases, users have been asking: What happens when I donate to a project but then the recipient never follows through?

This week, the site said that while that rarely happens, there's not much they can do about it when it does.

"Kickstarter does not investigate a creator's ability to complete their project," a team of Kickstarter's top officers said in a blog post. "Backers ultimately decide the validity and worthiness of a project by whether they decide to fund it."

I do believe that Kickstarter was founded on the principle that people are generally honest and often do the right thing, but then again this is the Internet generation fueled by the polar opposite.

Related Web URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/05/tech/web/kicksta...