The team behind the crowdfunding campaign for the Kickstarted documentary may have helped catch the largest Kickstarter fraud in history just in the nick of time, and literally quite by accident.
Correction: Maybe not THE largest…
The team explains in a recent blog post…
A couple of weeks ago, we reached out to the project creators behind Kobe Red, a company that was raising funds to make 100% Japanese beer fed Kobe beef jerky. Their product sounded delicious and we were intrigued to hear more about their crowdfunding story for our documentary film, Kickstarted. We thought these guys would make for a great interview. Plus, their project had massively exceeded it’s modest $2,374 goal, eventually reaching over $120,000 in pledges from 3,000 backers. However, after emailing back and forth with these guys, we started to get very suspicious about the legitimacy of Kobe Red. We decided to look more deeply into their operations and as a result helped to uncover what would have been the biggest fraud in Kickstarter’s history.
Wow.
The blog post goes on to explain how a simple interview request with the project creators turned into an exercise in rewards-based crowdfunding due diligence and the revelation that the campaign creators were being disingenuous.
The campaign originally spurned some very complimentary press about the aim of the campaign, but has since resulted in news outlets like Quartz using the instance as a platform to question Kickstarter’s overall approach to fraud.
Read more about the Kickstarted: The Documentary here
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