Well, as much as I like Kickstarter, I kinda knew this was gonna happen sooner or later. Outright fraud attempting to use Kickstarter to steal money. Details at Kickstarter and Rock Paper Shotgun.

On one hand, I'm sad (but not surprised) that this happened. Like I said, I think it was inevitable given wide-spread human nature that someone would see Kickstarter as a group of easy marks ready for the fleecing. On the other hand, the crowd caught this one. Any kickstarter that might attract enough attention to really take a lot of money will also attract enough attention that they should get caught. But I also can't say that I don't think people have successfully used Kickstarter as a scam vector before. (Hmm, double negative there. I DO think Kickstarter has probably BEEN used in this manner before now. These guys just got caught.)

I will say that all this only makes me a little more likely to wait to fund projects that are either close to hitting their goal or HAVE hit their goal. Crowd wisdom and all that. Which makes me a little sad. It means you have to have a 'base' before Kickstarter will work (in most circumstances). But until humans change (and I am not holding my breath), you gotta keep your eyes wide open and your hand on your wallet.

Dang, that sucks. Shame on them.

Yeah, Penny Arcade is who started me on researching the situation.

good eye, whoever caught em. I wondered if that could/would happen

Unless they were being specific to video games, there have definitely been kickstarters that got funded and then still haven't delivered anything.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sch ... sts/169192

Oh, the Kickstarter in question never even funded. The issue here is that the whole pitch can demonstrably be proven to be misleading. Almost all of the concept art has been tracked down to its original sources. The photo of the production companies office has been shown to be a photo of a completely unrelated office.

This isn't a project not coming through. This is pre-mediated (alleged) fraud.

I'm surprised it took so long for an outright scam to get caught.