Kickstarter is apparently not the place to go if you’re trying to crowdfund privacy hardware. Just days after the Anonabox project, a highly criticized effort to package the Tor privacy protection service into a portable miniature Wi-Fi router, was suspended by the crowdfunding site, another similar project has met its demise—and its founder’s account has been deleted.

TorFi, which Ars mentioned in a report on October 21, was a project by Jesse Enjaian and David Xu of Berkeley, California, aimed at creating home routers with turnkey Tor protection and support for OpenVPN connections—allowing users to route all their Internet traffic either through Tor's "onion router" network or a virtual private network provider of their choice. The project’s initial pitch was dependent on repurposing routers from TP-Link purchased through retail and re-flashing them with a customized version of the OpenWRT embedded operating system.

But just a day after Ars covered the TorFi project, Kickstarter suspended it. David Gallagher, a member of Kickstarter’s communications team, said that he couldn’t discuss the specific reasons for the suspension. “It’s our policy not to comment on individual projects,” he said in an e-mail.

However, based on Kickstarter’s FAQ page for creators—a link provided by Gallagher—projects could be suspended if the creator “is presenting someone else’s work as their own.” Given that TorFi was based on existing commercial hardware and open-source software, and the only addition Enjaian and Xu were making was to perform the reprogramming of the routers, and this may have been the reason for TorFi’s suspension.

Ars attempted to reach Enjaian for comment, but his Kickstarter account has been deleted. Enjaian, a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, had said in his biography that he was preparing for the US Patent and Trademark Office bar exam.