We shouldn't have been surprised
Indiegogo gets absolutely terrible consumer ratings at Consumer Affairs. 1.5 stars out of 5. And the reviews are pretty incredible, especially in the way Indiegogo appears to be totally indifferent to obvious scams.
- I was a backer of one of their campaigns and the complaints were insane. The company was delaying and messing up all over the place on an Indiegogo campaign and it was clearly becoming a scam. I sought help from Indiegogo and posted a complaint. Indiegogo ignored me and my concerns. So I filed a scam complaint with my credit card company and they refunded my money to me, despite as I learned in an email, that Indiegogo rebutted my claim. Shame on everyone involved. I understand these direct to consumer campaigns carry some level of risk, but it became clear to me that Indiegogo is a platform that has no desire to protect the consumer and allows themselves to in reality participate in frauds.
- I contributed to a campaign with Indiegogo - a weighted blanket costing 149.00. The campaign kept asking for contributors to “upgrade” by paying more for something larger, which I did not want. Months later, with no more emails regarding any delays, there is no product coming. Emails to the campaign went unanswered, and Indiegogo says they cannot help at all. If the campaign failed, we should be notified one way or the other. I will never use that them again. Very poor business.
- Have been waiting for a purchase for a very long time. The backer has the funds but has become totally unresponsive. Clearly no intention to deliver. You'd think IndieGoGo would step in to prevent fraud on their platform right? Wrong. Con artists.
- For two years, I have paid over $230. However I didn't receive any perks. I have contacted campaigners several times, but nobody replied for my messages. For the campaigns I have contributed, I have not received any of the them.
- I backed a campaign to the tune of $149 last year, which ultimately raised over $1.5m, and for which to this day, months after the last vague promises of dispatches, not a single product has been received. There are thousands of angry customers who have declared they have received nothing. The obviously fraudulent campaign has been flagged with Indiegogo, who not only do not offer refunds but also have not even shut down the campaign - it is still open and capable of receiving further funding! A criminal, somewhere, has made a fortune on the basis of a handful of flimsy lies, and all of it has been enabled by a company that chooses to look the other way whilst also profiting in the process. Indiegogo should be shut down.
Labels: law
26 Comments:
Maybe indiegogo employees should start wearing Mark Zuckerberg masks, to increase morale at work and their collective professional image in public.
I read back till June 2018, and all but one of the reviews are one star, always for the same reason: the campaigner grabs the money, doesn't deliver the promised product and they stop responding to emails. There seemed to be little overlap between complaints - most reviewers are complaining about different campaigns rather than 100s of people complaining about a handful of campaigns. Refund requests are ignored by IGG and scammers are allowed to operate without any pushback from IGG.
The people backing AH:Q must be about the only people to ever receive a refund from IGG...
Ye Gods, these Indiegogo people are scum. Make the rubble bounce.
The one and only time I have supported a crowdfunding campaign (yep, sorry) was an IndieGoGo campaign in June 2015 for a new version of a software for video frame rate conversion. Their campaign was a big success, and they kept all promises. They're still providing regular free updates almost four years later. Hell, I literally just installed a new update for the software a few seconds before writing this.
IndieGoGo has plenty of good campaigns from reliable and professional people, but it's so sad to learn that IndieGoGo is staffed by evil and incompetent clowns who are neither.
Absolutely no testing/accountability from Indiegogo. I also got scammed, got a chargeback from my credit card company. They disputed and failed since no product was delivered.
Contributions cannot be refunded by Indiegogo, if any of the following are true:
The contribution funds have already been transferred to the campaign owner
The campaign has ended
The perk associated with the contribution has been fulfilled (contribution is marked as fulfilled on Indiegogo by the campaigner)
Indiegogo determines that there has been an abuse of our Terms of Use, or the refund policy.
Please note, we are unable to cancel your campaign or issue mass refunds for any campaign that has raised funds.
A cynic would read these policy items as a waiver attempting to release IGG of criminal intent and action liability. Interesting. IANAL, does IGG having this policy make their actions criminal rather than civil?
@2 - And that one positive review (5 stars) is basically the guy saying "Caveat emptor, dudes! Giving money to Indiegogo is as good as setting it on fire, so don't spend what you can't lose!". Apparently IGG is an libertardian-based enterprise that just looks like an accessory after the fact to widespread fraud.
People seem to be confused about what IndieGogo (and other crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter) are about. They're not stores. (Both Kickstarter and Indiegogo are very explicit about this.) Once the campaign completes, the funds go to the entrepreneur, and Indiegogo's job is done.
If the entrepreneur doesn't deliver, which sometimes happens, the money is gone. Indiegogo can't claw back the money, because it's almost certainly not there; it's been spent already on salaries, equipment and so forth. (Assuming, of course, it's not a total scam.)
It's very much like the (really) old days of personal computing. Lots of engineers with not a lot of capital were building S-100 boards and advertising them in Byte & Dr. Dobb's Journal. Most of those companies were very thinly capitalized, and asked people to give them money now for boards later. These early adopters often got their boards long after other paying customers (because selling boards to a new customer meant more cash in hand; shipping a board to an early adopter didn't generate any new cash). And yes, there were scammers.
One prominent scam was the World Power Systems scam, which netted hundreds of thousands of dollars in the late 1970s.
I've always looked at Indiegogo and Kickstarter as venture capital. Never buy something that's beyond your 'mad money' threshold.
I'm not clear why they cannot contact VISA and file a claim (item not delivered)? I've had this happen to me using online websites. Recently I purchased a large free standing bathtub (for kids) and paid about $980. I didn't get the bathtub, was sent a few messages stringing me along, and in the meantime I had to go overseas for work for a month, and when I returned the company had filed to declare bankruptcy. I filed my paperwork with VISA immediately (via my bank).
The money was immediately placed in the bank account that links VISA. Then the company filed some flimsy paperwork and the money was removed. Then my bank filled more paperwork challenging them to provide evidence the item was delivered (they have a department with experts that do this all day). The scam company went quiet and I got my money back. Maybe it took 3 or 4 months in total. I was able to find similar evidence as posted here about the company to support my claim (many others had found out who the owners were, how they'd did this previously, etc... so my 'research' when I made the first claim was done in one evening online).
There is a legal process in place. They cannot just take your money. VISA also has insurance for some scams and you are entitled to use of that. They've allowed a company to use their services, now that company has to live by the banking laws and their VISA contract (which they agree to when they open up shop).
I think most people just rollover.
Fight!
These paper-tigers fold quick enough :D
I applaud every atty on this case helping in defense of everyone here and Mr. Day.
Indiegiggo is a huge deal.. However I do fully expect a apology from Ben Shapiro to Vox Day.
Dave Jones in Australia runs the large YouTube channel 'EEvblog', covering electronic engineering topics of various sorts. He regularly debunks obvious frauds – the electronic equivalent of perpetual motion machines – that appear on crowdfunding sites.
In one video (#467) from five years ago, he points out that Kickstarter had recently changed its requirements such that you had to show a working prototype before you could launch a campaign. Indiegogo allows (or allowed at the time) complete pie-in-the-sky scam campaigns that could provably never deliver the promised results, even if the campaign organizers weren't knowingly running a scam and were just overly-optimistic idiots.
This whole crowd funding thing has always seemed to me like a setup that invites fraud. And apparently that is how it is turning out. If they get away with it, it will only get worse.
Has Uncle 2-Face ever shipped CyberFrog? Or is that still vaporware as well?
I'm still waiting on my Alt-Hero RPG in hardcover, but I've rec'd a whole lot of stuff that Alt-Hero has successfully shipped, and can't wait for issues 7-18.
MAKE THE RUBBLE BOUNCE
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Joshua 10:19
but do not stay there yourselves; pursue your enemies and attack them in the rear. Do not allow them to enter their cities, for the LORD your God has delivered them into your hand."
25 Joshua said to them, “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Be strong and courageous. This is what the Lord will do to all the enemies you are going to fight.” 26 Then Joshua put the kings to death and exposed their bodies on five poles, and they were left hanging on the poles until evening.
30 The Lord also gave that city and its king into Israel’s hand. The city and everyone in it Joshua put to the sword. He left no survivors there.
40He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.
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Psalm 68
21 Surely God will crush the heads of his enemies,
the hairy crowns of those who go on in their sins.
22 The Lord says, “I will bring them from Bashan;
I will bring them from the depths of the sea,
23 that your feet may wade in the blood of your foes,
while the tongues of your dogs have their share.”
I seem to recall that Channel Awesome did an Indiegogo campaign for a game show. They got $95,000 and the resulting show was clearly not done for that amount.
Sure, they don't protect their customers from scams and frauds, but they do protect them from hatefully hateful evil nazi hating haters, and that's what really matters, right?
https://twitter.com/iron_mickey_/status/1118363296887975936 Jewish Trump supporter is trying to get Owen Benjamin deplatformed same day Owen was banned from Paypal. Same person? The irony is baffling!
Indienogo
Why am I not surprised to see this?
This is just the tip of one of many internet deceitful icebergs.
@8 Seems people like you are confused about what crowdfunding is. It shouldn't be a store, but the vast majority of crowdfunding projects are sold as a pre-order product. How many crowdfunding projects can you think of that has in its pitch page "there's a chance that this product wouldn't be delivered, if that's the case don't expect to get a cent of your money back!" ? People say that crowdfunding are investments but when investments go belly up even investors have ways to get as much of their investments back as possible. Why shouldn't crowdfunding backers get the same amount of protection?
This brings some questions to mind...
Was AH:Q terminated and refunded by Indiegogo because Vox & The VFM didn’t give some sort of “secret token” letting them in on a cut of an assumed scam?
Is Indiegogo just a front for legions of Internet con artists who commit fraud unimpeded, while the company takes a cut for preventing backers from seeking any corrective actions?
Has the Evil Legion of Evil uncovered any evidence to support this conspiracy theory?
I've participated in a few campaigns. But they were either simple hardware or coming from an established outfit to anticipate actual demand.
@21
>Why shouldn't crowdfunding backers get the same amount of protection?
Indeed. Not to mention how many projects simply avoid admitting failure by delaying for years or simply ceasing all communications, forcing you as backer to trawl through (foreign) business registries to see if bankruptcy has occured.
And that's before we go into the (legal but slimy) tactics employed by many crowdfunding campaigns.
We give people a lot of consumer protection, and because of that a lot of people are relative naives when they enter the business world, which is what you are doing with this crowd funding. Even if you know better, you end up in a group where many do not, thus the problem with swindles.
Sounds like something should be done about indygogo.
Time to drop PayPal; and tell them why.
Speaking of obvious scams:
https://youtu.be/pZYWO0ylFoQ
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