Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, crimson rhen of the true north, kickstarter, kickstarter fail, Thom Pratt

Kickstarter Fail – Crimson Rhen Gets Kicktrolled Over Thanksgiving

Published Tue, 03 Dec 2013 14:00:58 -0600

We've run Kickstarter Fails looking at those using Kickstarter to raise money that don't always… work out.

But of late, there have been more from bidders who are scammers.

At least they were trying to scam free goods. There are those who do it, it seems, for shits and giggles.

Thom Pratt writes about his Crimson Rhen Of The True North Kickstarter…

We had a backer using the (presumably) fake name of "Lee McAllister" back us for around $500. That's not a red flag per se, as we had a few other backers pledge at that level, too.

But over the holiday weekend, he suddenly raised his bid to $1,000. "Well, okay," we thought, "maybe he reeeeaallly wanted to see the project get funded."

And then we woke up to suddenly find ourselves at 65% of goal, up from around 25%. Why?

Well, "Lee" suddenly increased his pledge to $10,000. And bragged about it in the comments.

"just pledged 10,000 dollars into this! Hope it works!"

TEN GRAND. The price of a used car. Nearly half or our funding goal.

Obviously, the spider sense was tingling. So I wrote him to ask him if he had added a zero too many to his amount, to which he said "No, I think that's right."

And then he immediately proceeded to cut his funding by $5,000.

And there we sat, about 50% funded over the Thanksgiving holiday. Not feeling particularly thankful, but nervous.

What if this guy "helped" us get funded by the skin of our teeth only to skip out on the bill? We'd still be short a few grand, have to deliver the project to the paying backers and be liable for Kickstarter and Amazon fees.

Or what if we were, say, 105% funded, and he pulled his $5K out a minute or two before the campaign closed? Talk about a roller coaster ride of emotion!

So here we are, not much further ahead than we were before Thanksgiving and with a dark cloud hanging over this campaign. I mean, would you back a project that suddenly lost nearly half of its funding in a few short days?