Two indie comic artists received a valuable lesson on the fine art of crowdfunding when a scammer copied their Kickstarter campaign word-for-word to a rival site. And the scammer was a real public relations hustler.
“It was actually kind of educational,” Ken Lowery, one of the artists, told Comic Alliance.
Lowery and his partner, Robert Wilson IV, launched the Kickstarter on April 15, 2013. Their project—a one-off comic about a psychic medium investigating a long-term haunting in her neighborhood—met its goal quickly, about three days after launching. That was when Wilson received a curious Google Alert (he has one set to his name, which might seem vain but, as this case shows, is pretty damn useful).
The message told him that a Robert Wilson IV was also running a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo. As the only Robert Wilson IV writing a comic called “Like a Virus,” he was reasonably confident the thing was a scam.
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