The creator is Thomas Negovan, a former member of Kickstarter's inaugural Community Advisory Council. Over the past two years I backed four of his book campaigns. None have been fulfilled.

This week he posted an identical update to all four unfulfilled campaigns announcing a new Kickstarter for another book.

When asked a basic question: where are the proofs? He had previously said one of the books was going to the printers in November 2025. No images, no progress updates, no evidence of work, just "trust me."

**His first reply** cited "25+ years in business and more than 80 successfully fulfilled projects" and offered a refund, framing the refund as a favor because "this is Kickstarter, not a hostage situation." He did not answer the question.

I pushed back, noting that a track record should make showing a single proof page trivial, and that offering a refund instead of evidence is a way to make critical backers disappear rather than answer them.

**His final reply** is the part I think other backers should see. I'll quote the relevant portions directly:

> "...if we start chasing accusations of this company as a multi-decade scam, or offering 'evidence that the project actually exists' we lose sight of the mission of actually making the books come out."

> "You're misunderstanding the relationship here; you're welcome to preorder the books at a substantial discount, but in return we ask for patience as our publishing schedule unfolds according to its ability."

> "We'll process a refund for each of you... and I hope that you'll revisit the book when it's available in our shop."

Note what he did there. He put "evidence that the project actually exists" in scare quotes as if that's an unreasonable thing for a backer of four unfulfilled campaigns to want. He reframed Kickstarter pledges as "preorders" where the only acceptable backer behavior is patience. And he offered a refund as the resolution to a question he never answered.

**What happened next:** He refunded my pledges on all four campaigns, unprompted and without discussion, which blocked me from the campaign pages and deleted my comments, removing the exchange from view of anyone considering the new campaign.

I'm posting this because:

1. "Refund and block" is a pattern that erases the public record other backers rely on when deciding whether to pledge.
2. A creator's response to "show me the work" tells you more than any track record does. A confident creator shows a photo. This one wrote three paragraphs about why he shouldn't have to.

I've also reported this to Kickstarter's trust and safety team. Posting here so the information exists somewhere he can't delete it.

*edit* Art book Kickstarters routinely take 2-4 years, so each new campaign launched while the previous was still within a normal timeline. The point is not the delays or lack of fulfillment, the point is to communicate how this creator responds when backers ask reasonable questions: by deflecting to his track record, reframing legitimate scrutiny as unreasonable, and then refunding and blocking the people asking for proof of work.

Solo founder here. Hardware startup. More than a year ago I decided to turn my side project into my full-time job. Bootstrapped. Did everything I possibly could myself and with the help of a few amazing friends. Took blood and tears but finally made it to launch. In a little more than 3 weeks we sold more than 250 units to 230+ customers generating 30k in revenue.

It still feels unreal. When I was 19 I tried doing a startup but failed and lost all my money. Never made it to market. I learned from my mistakes and 12 years later came back and did it right. I’m very happy it’s successful because after all I’ve put in I don’t know if I could’ve handled it failing. It just wasn’t an option. I went all in and took a huge gamble and it paid off.

I can finally relax for the first time in a long time. We do have a crucial 6 months ahead of us taking it to the next level from here.

If I can give one piece of advice is to always believe in yourself and don’t give up no matter how hard it gets I faced so many challenges and was so close to giving up so many times and if I did I would’ve never gotten to experience this wonderful feeling everyone deserves to have one day.

For anyone hoping to get help from Kickstarter:

Kickstarter is about making money by promoting and selling already several times overly funded and already well kickstarted project that do not need any further kickstarting at all.

At any giving moment on homepage you will always find 13/13 completly funded projects. Sometimes dosen of times over. And zero projects that actually need help to be kickstarted.

Every mail update you get for project that struggles to find it's backers, 70% of the mail is dedicated to other finished projects just trying to sell.

Many of these projects have kickstarter "goal" that is less than what it takes to build kickstarter page itself. And it's "backed" in less than it takes anyone to even read it. They just need a platform to sell, not to be "kickstarted", and platform owners are loving it.

Kickstarter and most of creators there do not care or really want you to back projects from individuals with great ideas that need backing and may fail. They just want to sell finished company products.

It's just misleading, if not a scam. So just something to keep in mind. Good luck to everyone though.

We're a week into our Kickstarter campaign and we're only a quarter of the way towards our goal. Zero dollars spent on advertising. Zero mailing list. Just dove headfirst into the pool without even checking how deep the water was. Roast our campaign. Tell us where we went wrong. Be merciless. We can take it. Probably.

Hi all, super quick background for context: My name is Bryce, and I run a company called Wraithmarked Creative. We are the largest book publisher on Kickstarter second to Brandon Sanderson's Dragonsteel. 50+ campaigns successfully funded. 5+ years on the platform. $10mil+ USD raised.

Now onto my point:

If you are a new/beginning creator, please DO NOT set your funding goal lower than what you actually need to produce your product.

I keep seeing the advice handed out on this subreddit that to "overfund" or "get traction", you should do a low goal so that you fund in the first X hours, and then ramp from there.

If you are a veteran creator with experience in the space and a good sense of what your actual funding level will be, that's one thing. You have an understanding of the risks, you have an understanding of what you can afford to lose if things go south, etc.

As a new/beginner creator, however, this is a great way to risk screwing yourself and your reputation in whatever space you are working in.

Let's work with an example:

Person A and Person B want to create a toy. Let's call it Toy 1. A and B have both done the math. Toy 1 is going to cost them $10k USD minimum (including all costs) to produce and get in the hands of their customers. If A and B raise more than that, great, but if they raise less than that, they will lose money on Toy 1.

Person A set their funding goal at $10k USD.

Person B set their funding goal at $500 USD to try to "fund" in 24hrs.

Both raise $5000 USD in the end. What happens next?

For Person A, they fail to fund their campaign, but while that's frustrating, it's not a bad thing. A failed campaign is not a death knell on Kickstarter. In fact, it's a great opportunity to learn from mistakes, as well as pull Backers from in the future (with Updates) if Person A wants to try again in the future.

For Person B, though... There's trouble. While they did "fund" their campaign with "1000%" success rate, they have a major issue: They now owe customers product, but have only managed to raise $5k of the $10k minimum they needed. In order to fulfill the project as promised, they have to pay $5k out of their own pocket (and potentially more depending on increased costs related to producing less of Toy 1 than expected). That's... not good. For anyone. Even if the "fund early" tactic worked REALLY well and Person B raised $7500 instead of the $5k, they are still left $2500 in debt. Again, not good for anyone.

You can scale the above as high as you want. There are plenty of examples all the way up into the 6-figure campaigns and beyond of people underfunding their campaigns by accident with tactics like "Have a lower funding goal than you need". People's lives have been ruined, and even more reputations have been left shredded because of this problem.

So, one more time: If you are a new/beginning creator, please DO NOT set your funding goal lower than what you actually need to produce your product.

Best,
Bryce

My guess is it will eventually ship and be completely different from the ads. The product shown in the videos isn’t even remotely possible with today’s technology, especially not at $64 lmaoooo

I recently finished my second Kickstarter campaign. It reached around 85% of the funding goal but didn’t make it across the line.

I wanted to share a few things I learned, especially because this campaign was very different from my first attempt four years ago.

My first campaign was launched far too early. The product was incomplete, the campaign was poorly prepared, and I didn’t really understand crowdfunding. It got almost no traction, and I mentally gave up pretty quickly.

This time, the product itself was much more complete. The files, software, BOM, assembly guide, calibration process, and overall system were ready enough to deliver. I also changed the format from a complete hardware product to a lower-cost DIY digital package.

A few things surprised me:

• Several media outlets covered the project, and media ended up contributing roughly one third of the sales.
• Kickstarter’s internal traffic helped, especially saved projects and followers.
• The campaign reached around 80% with about a week left, so I expected the final 48 hours to create a strong push.
• That final push never really happened.

My current interpretation is that I simply didn’t have a large enough warm audience before launch. The final reminders can only convert people who are already watching or following the campaign. If that pool is small, there is only so much they can do.

I also think I may have made the wrong choice on product format. The DIY version reduced the visible price, but it also asked users to source parts, print components, and assemble the system themselves. Some people who liked the idea may have preferred a complete, ready-to-use product instead.

My main lessons are:

1. A product being ready is necessary, but not enough.
2. Pre-launch audience building matters much more than I expected.
3. Email lists and followers should be built before launch, not during it.
4. Product format matters just as much as price.
5. Media coverage can have a real impact.

I’m disappointed that it didn’t reach the goal, but I don’t think the campaign was pointless. I now have much better information about where the traffic came from, what people responded to, and what I should change next.

For anyone who has been through a near-miss campaign: did you relaunch, switch to direct sales, or change the product format completely?

My campaign has been stuck at around 77% for several days, with only 8 days left.

For creators who've been in this situation before: what actually helped in the final week?

More updates? Paid ads? Media outreach? Asking existing backers to share? Or just waiting for the final 48-hour push?

Not posting the campaign link — genuinely looking for advice.

Avoid World of Game Design and STONEworks Gaming projects

Currently dealing with the worst backing experience I ever been a part of. Iv backed less than 15 projects in my time on the site so Ive not seen it all, but the creators behind the GyrmWyrd Omnibus project, as well as whomever is actually a part of STONEworks gaming and World of Game Design, have made this an incredibly disappointing and frustrating situation. I could drone on about the issues but myself and other backers have already been doing so on the Kickstarter platform, to no avail, so I will simply leave my warning here and link the project if anyone is interested in witnesses a complete mismanagement of a project and a bunch of unhappy backers.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stoneworksgaming/horror-epics-grymwyrd-omnibus-5e

Project was slated for delivery of rewards in December and ho boy, have things not gone as planned.

been sharing some of my comic work online lately and half the replies are just "that's AI." not even a question. just a verdict.
like cool thanks, guess I'll go burn my sketchbooks then lol ;)
I get the skepticism. AI stuff is everywhere. but when did "this looks too clean" become an insult? since when is polished = fake?
do you guys even bother defending it anymore or just let it go? have you started posting process pics with everything now? genuinely asking because I don't know what the move is here.

This has seriously gotten out of hand. I get dozens of emails a day telling me to pay $400+ for their useless services. I told them they can work on a commission basis if they believe in themselves so much.

My campaign did very well in the first few days. We received over 130 backers hitting 800%+ of our funding goal but now on day 5 I feel a slow down. Any advice for legit ways to keep our momentum going?

It seems we could do a better job capturing organic traffic from kickstarter. Gaining followers but not turning into sales.

Thank you for your help/ feedback

Been doing research for my own campaign and it feels like 90% of the breakout successes are tech gadgets and board games.

I'm working on something in the gift/souvenir items and I'm looking for proof it can work here. Anyone know of gift-type campaigns (stationery, home goods, holiday gifts, souvenirs — anything non-tech) that did really well?

Would love some examples to study.

I launched a Kickstarter project recently and I was flooded with spam and bots at varying degree of complexity. Some were very clearly spammers trying to get my info, I've seen that 1000 times and I was able to detect them. BUT, some were actual backers.

The backer spammers have reputable profiles like "superbacker" with history on Kickstarter. I was trying to figure out how they get that history... my best guess is that they offer to purchase someone's profile, or find a way to hack user history? (that seems less likely) Or maybe use a back/unback method that may still record them backing projects without spending a dime.

But nonetheless, yes some of the spammers were super backers. Here is what they do:
1. Back you early on to build good grace and are more likely to get you engaged
2. Make a public comment on the campaign with the main goal to try to get the communication off platform. Kickstarter does warn about this.
3. Some of them even emailed me directly, with a similar proposition, but since they established outside contact already, this one is more of "we can give you the heavens"... a bit more obvious spam
4. The comments/messages may include
- promises of "I have a big network of superbackers, super interested in this project ...etc"
- OR "I would love to directly help you ...."
- OR "I can make an intro to ____ "
- and many versions of
5. The backer $ amount was anywhere between $1 to hundreds. Honestly it was a bit hard seeing the campaign to up and down on funding.
6. Again, some of the profiles WERE super backers with a long history. That's the only reason I would give some of the backers a bit more credibility. For example, the one that really got me was a superbacker with 30 backed projects.
7. When you do not reply within a day or insist on keeping the conversation on the platform, you get "un-backed", basically they cancel their pledge :D
8. Either the spam user or Kickstarter will then remove their public content. Poof, all slate is clean.

Anyway, just thought to share so other crowd-founders know what to expect.

ive been lurking here for a while and seeing all the well-deserved hate for AI hardware vaporware and spam campaigns lately. honestly it made me a bit anxious to post tbh. but we're getting close to launching our first project and i could really use some blunt criticism from people who actually back things.

so basically we're building this thing called Kitto. its an animated cyberpunk digital pet for your desk. instead of a cold smart speaker we wanted to make something with an actual sense of personality... real-time conversational lip-sync, emotional reactions, and code-driven animations. we currently have a working physical prototype running on an esp32s3+esp32p4 chip (you can see the real testing in the video attached, plus a clip of it hanging out with a real black cat so you know it definately exists off-screen lol). we'll be migrating to a Linux chip for the final production run but it was important to me to prove the tech actually works right now and isnt just some scammy 3D render.

we just put the pre-launch page up but before we start promoting it I'd love your honest eyes on it. my main worries are if the prototype proof looks credible enough? i know 3D renders are a massive red flag here. we tried to include real GIFs on the page but idk if it's enough to build trust. also is the page structure clear, or is the messaging confusing? like what is the ONE detail that would make you hesitate or click away?

I'm way too close to the project to see its flaws right now, so any brutal honesty is appreciated. let me know if you're willing to take a look at the page and I'll drop the link in the comments or DM it to you. thanks in advance.

From August 25 to today — even though there are still 20 days left in the campaign — I've already seen how this whole thing is going to play out.

here's quick summary. Maybe it'll help someone else down the road, even though this was our first campaign too.

1. We put all our focus on product and fulfillment, and massively underestimated marketing and ads. We figured if we just threw money, traffic would come, and it'd be like all those successful projects — totally under control. Wrong XXXL. The truth is, fulfillment only matters if people can actually find you and understand you. Making a great product doesn't mean if you can't sell it. Even though hardware crowdfunding has a pretty high rate of delays and abandoned projects.
2. You're going to hit problems, 100%. ones you ignored early on? They eat up way more and more of your time later. Calbank's design and production went pretty smoothly — even with revisions, the delays were reasonable. But prelaunch alone wasted us two and half months. Some of that was our own bad judgment, sure. But that delay pushed us into another mistake.
3. And when you signal that you're struggling, the vultures show up. You get flooded with emails, big promises — fix your ads, find the problem, boost your ROI. But you have to pay FIRST!! Anywhere from $200 to $2,000, even $50. At first you wonder why someone would write back and forth for so little money — their time is worth something too, right? But they're not trying to earn the bigger, results-based money. They're just waiting for prey to wander into the ambush.
4. The wildest one? 14 emails and 2 proposals back and forth. But we could tell instantly — it was GPT output. Of course we use GPT heavily ourselves. They think long emails look sincere and thoughtful. In reality, the other side is just feeding the generated text back into GPT and extracting keywords. If that's what people are using GPT for — garbage in, garbage out — that's just too sad. But our sincerity did get burned by all this. By the time we figured out what was going on, the time was already gone.
5. Every problem eventually gets solved. But the only person who can really help you our is YOURSELF. Through this campaign, we saw our own problems and learned a ton. We accept the whole thing for what it is. We've seen ourselves grow — and that's the biggest takeaway.

If anything genuinely helped us, it was the trust from backers all over the world. As a startup with just 4.5 people+ one cat, being able to do business globally is still incredibly exciting to us.

And of course — the Reddit posts, and the people who took our questions seriously, those genuinely helped. Thank you.

We'll keep making products and keep getting the word out. And I hope these words help someone just starting out. If we'd come to Reddit and asked questions earlier, we probably would've avoided some of these detours.

Looking for advice and opinions. Do you think it's best to post a project on kickstarter in the very beginning, conceptual stages to get funding to start or post it midway with some more proof of the item and concept to get funding needed to further/finish the project?

My kickstarter campaign is called Tales Against Time

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matadorromero/tales-against-time-issue-1-of-5

It follows this holiday called Rewind Day. If you’re old, injured or terminally ill, you get restored back to your prime. It follows 2 stories.

The main story follows this disgraced scientist and his estranged daughter attempting to discover the catalyst for rewind day, potentially living out rewind day everyday and becoming immortal. In the comic, there’s interludes to the scientist’s journal showing lore.

Then there’s a bonus story, which after posting a Google survey to Reddit, I was able to connect to a artist who’s worked for Marvel, DC, Darkhorse, etc. Serving as a anthology to how different parts of the world experience rewind day.

Everytime I showed the premise, people were hooked. I planned convention dates to show the book and the kickstarter. Printed out flyers, promoted on social media. But it’s been stuck on 10% with 10 days left.

Is it the small goal? Should have I accounted for physical copies for a bigger goal? It’s not the end of the world, I’m always gonna revisit this comic and had the 5 issues written. Or is it out of my hands?

Cosa ne pensate dell'idea di un gioco da tavolo ibrido supportato da un'App con Intelligenza Artificiale?

L'idea sarebbe quella di usare l'AI per generare storie e trame infinite e personalizzate in base alle scelte dei giocatori, mantenendo comunque tutte le componenti fisiche al tavolo (carte, dadi, plancia)

Vi stuzzicherebbe una meccanica del genere o preferite i giochi da tavolo più classici?

Context: We're working on an online space strategy game (Nebulae), with our core focus being on politics. The idea is that players start out on their individual planets, but also collectively govern various political regimes, from monarchies to democracies, from federations to theocracies.

We also had a previous success on Kickstarter in 2019 (42k€) and released the first version on mobile (Android) with 3500+ installs on the main listing page, and improving early metrics (session length x3.5, day 1 retention x3, day 30 retention x4). The current Kickstarter is supposed to help us bring the mobile version to PC.

(if you can destroy our kickstarter page / the remainder of our self-confidence, that'd be welcome. And if you want a fun horror story, read on)

Pre-launch: Things were going ok, not great, but ok - we ran some paid traffic through facebook (~1.08€ blended cost per lead), collecting emails, but also "Notify me" clicks on the Kickstarter pre-launch page. We collected about 2900 additional emails (meta + tiktok), in addition to our existing 13k, as well as 630 "Notify Me" subscriptions on Kickstarter.

The first orange flag was that Meta was not correctly attributing the leads: We were getting about 50 "notify me"s per day, but Meta was only registering 2-4 of them (artificially inflating our cost per lead on that specific campaign in the dashboard to 260€ per lead - lol).

For emails, several months ago, we purchased a proprietary IP address from our email service provider (Brevo, previously SendInBlue) to make sure that we wouldn't mix with the spam emails. We also ran several smaller-scale mailing tests to make sure that deliverability was ok. During the tests, some of the addresses hard-bounced (fake / typos / no longer in use), and some of them soft-bounced for an unknown reason (= undisclosed by the email service).

We also secured a couple content creator streams, spread evenly over the 21 days of the campaign. Julie - one of our studio creators also secured a slot on a national radio station to talk about the game and the journey, on the day following the launch.

And on Monday 20th April, we pressed "Launch".

Launch Day: We're based in France, so the launch was done at about 8pm local time (2pm EST, 11am PST). We thought - "great, the Europeans will give us the head-start on the campaign, and by the time the Americas watch the campaign in (their) evening, there will already be some pledges, and in the morning, we'll be on French radio, so that's gonna be great!"

Let me tell you, that did NOT go as planned.

Emails: Since all our test campaigns were smaller scale (1-4k newsletters), we never actually tested the full-scale blast to all of the addresses - at once. So, when the launch newsletter went out to the ~16k emails, here's what went down:

1. The emails were delivered normally to all email domains.
2. Except the ones ending in gmail dot com. So like 82% of the totality of our leads, lol.
3. We subsequently discovered that there was an additional email domain authentication (in addition to SPF, DKIM &DMARC dns records, which we already had set up), that we never obtained.
4. But the damage was already done. The IP address we purchased was scorched and became essentially unusable.
5. We spent 96h first trying to repair the mailing thing, before abandoning that ship, and migrating to a different email service.

"Notify Me" conversions: 3% conversion (20 pledges from 600+) in the first 48h or so. No changes to the page content between the prelaunch and the launch - except the preview image being replaced by the actual game trailer.

The radio appearance: The clip (2mins) is quite nice and reusable in the future, but it drove an absolute 0 of conversions of any kind.

Ads:

1. Because the other problems mentioned above are clearly not big enough, we also had our bank reject the payment of ads to Meta on both our company cards (suspicious transaction above the bank's internal limits, whereas we had increased the ad budget for the launch window).
2. This means we had to manually pay for ads once or twice per day, with the ads not running as soon as a payment was due (no grace period due to frequent interruptions). And most of the time Meta charges us between 4am to 7am French time (so, some of the prime time in the Americas).
3. We suspect that it very seriously messed with the Meta algorithm's capability to learn and drive qualified traffic to our page, but we don't know for sure. (Except for the fact that the average time per active user, according to Google Analytics, is 6-8s (depending on the day).

Content creators: They were very nice, very supportive, and we have a lot of fun clips that we can reuse on our social media later on. In terms of conversions, they brought in 20€, so that's cool.

So, what should we do? What can help the situation?

Oh, and here's the trailer if you're still here, there's no banana for scale, but we do have a trailer.

https://reddit.com/link/1swyq7y/video/oww56myrcpxg1/player

I had to ask because i find this bizarre. It doesnt even solve the scammers problem cause scammers will back and then message you, trying to scam you.

So, Now no one can message each other for cross promotion? This was the LIFEBLOOD of newcomers in the platform..... I wouldnt have done as well if it wasnt for this damn cross promotion option easily accessible through DMing!!

Hello everyone!

We're currently considering launching a Kickstarter campaign for our game, and while working on our pitch deck I received some interesting feedback from a friend who works at a publishing studio.

His opinion was that Kickstarter can sometimes be seen as a red flag by publishers. His reasoning was that Kickstarter sales are "unofficial" (they're not reflected in Steam sales), backers usually don't leave Steam reviews unless they buy the game again, and there have been cases where successful Kickstarter campaigns overpromised features that were never delivered.

I know this is just one perspective based on his experience, and I'm also aware of the many benefits a successful Kickstarter campaign can bring.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this.

Been running and supporting campaigns on Kickstarter since the 2010s, but no superbacker status due to old email being hacked. I did customer service on my last job and also for a friend's campaign more recently, so I have come across a few thousands of backers.

I honestly think many Superbackers (SB) are just trolling creators for fun

The comments from those SB really make me wonder how they make enough money to back so many projects, is life really that easy for them? On larger campaign with strict "reply all comments" policy, I had to repeat the same answer for 10+ times every day on the same comment section (their answer is literally on the same page, around 1 inch max away on their screen). How could these people even order from a drive-thru with this level of comprehension?

And then there are those private messages about "gimme special arrangement" and "ooooh I am not satisfied Ima get refund" from them. Like they are ordering from Target and not some 5-people team running on an idea and hope. The SBs are the ones who ask for last-minute address changes, even though they are supposed to have the most experience on shipping. As KS has very little protection against unreasonable card chargebacks unless the reward has been delivered (with proof), many just abuse that to get refund after abusing our team for months.

I'm preparing my first Kickstarter and I keep hitting the same wall. There are 3 things I want people to do:

1. Join my email list
   
2. Tap "Notify me on launch" on my Kickstarter prelaunch page
   
3. Follow my Instagram

But let's be real, most people will do one at most. If I only get one ask, which one actually matters most?

I'd love to hear from people who've run campaigns. Did your Kickstarter followers actually convert? Was Instagram worth anything?

I've been using Kickstarter for 15 years without major complaint, and I've always understood the inherent risks. I've waited years for rewards more than once, and I never felt tricked. However, that changed recently:

I backed a campaign (Domitree Alt) that went out of its way to look like a ready-to-ship product. Foolishly, I thought because of how much strongly they implied it was a ready product, and because they didn't mention any shipping fee, Kickstarter would easily let me cancel if the creators couldn't fulfill.

After funding, it was hit with:

• Exorbitant shipping fees that were never made clear during the campaign
• Rolling, incremental delays, a few weeks at a time, update after update
• Significant product redesigns, announced only to backers while the original design was still being advertised and sold.
• Short, indiscernible update videos 'showing progress' that were only a few seconds long.
• Post-launch updates to original campaign text, with no record of what has changed, making it difficult for customers to call them out. (Note: wayback machine does not work with kickstarter, so always save by printing the page to PDF instead. Learned this the hard way)

I'm posting now because I'm starting to see campaigns that look very similar cropping up and worry that more people will back similar campaigns only to have their money held hostage while Kickstarter Support doesn't seem willing to help. I know that this isn't a 100% new problem, but I think with AI it is becoming easier for people to churn out these kinds of projects and make them look more ready than they actually are.

Some signs with these products I have noticed:

• Polished prototype video and imagery, showing the product interacted with by people for a few seconds at a time, often hardware with some sort of 'wow-factor' (e.g. furniture with motors and swiveling features), advertised like it is a finished product or 'final prototype'.
• Marketing that is hard to tell from AI, as it is getting a lot harder to tell. We found some videos accidentally labeled AI generated and they looked like the same marketing material all over the campaign.
• Location inconsistency, e.g. Project based in US City but creator based elsewhere (often China).
• Glowing Comments pinned to top, immediately followed by dissatisfied comments complaining about incremental delays or having not received their product yet.
• Updates that cross-promote different creators, who have projects that show similar signs.

A small note to add: It is hard to confirm, but I think that at least in some cases, the same group of people are operating multiple different profiles in order to hide their track record from new backers.

If you have stories, please share:

I've seen a lot of campaigns that have launched recently with these signs where the comments follow a familiar pattern. If you ran into this kind of issue, what did you back, and what happened?

• What did you back, and how is the project looking now?
• What warning signs did you miss or only notice later?
• Are you seeing other projects with the same warning signs?

It doesn't have to be a confirmed scam, but it would be good to discuss if you feel like Kickstarter's Trust and Safety department is not handling something you feel like they should be helping you with.

Apparently you can't see the updates or comments on those updates if you haven't backed... but the main comment thread should be enough.

So that brings me to this.. if kickstarter won't do anything about scams (even when it's $300k+), what's stopping me from starting a kickstarter and racking in money right now?

Seems there's zero recourse or punishment, so it's open season for scammers here?

Here's what got me feeling this way: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/denten/kioku-complete-japanese-learning-card-series/comments