Crowdfunding has revolutionized the way companies are formed and products get made. An inventor submits a brilliant idea, total strangers give money to help him achieve his dream, and the next Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset or Pebble smartwatch is born.

But it has also made it easier for scammers to reach directly into the wallets of naive investors by posting campaigns for nonexistent companies or products. And while each crowdfunding platform claims to have antifraud mechanisms in place, they don’t always work as well as they should.



Read: 10 Things You Must Know Before You Invest in That Crazy Crowdfunding Scheme



How easy is it to post a fictional fundraising campaign without being detected? To find out, we created a test campaign and attempted to get it past the barriers at three of the leading crowdfunding platforms for tech gadgets: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and RocketHub.

In one case, it was impossible. With the two others, though, it was stupidly easy, though our test campaigns did eventually get flagged.

The campaign

We didn’t want anyone confusing this campaign with a genuine one, so we asked for $500 to build “A Friggin’ Time Machine.”

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We uploaded a YouTube video (the original trailer from Back to the Future), a photo of the famous DeLorean, links to a Space.com article on time travel, a Twitter account for Back to the Future’s Doc Brown, and a photograph of Eric Bana, star of The Time Traveler’s Wife. We also tossed in a few references to the The Terminator and The Time Machine.

Of course, we offered rewards (also called perks or goods). For $100 you could time-travel backward up to the year 1750; for $200 you could go forward up to the year 2065. We assumed no liability if you ran into your future self and obliterated the universe.

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We even offered a refund, of sorts. If you were unsatisfied with your contribution, we offered to take you back in time to the moment right before you made it, so you could have a do-over.

Kickstarter: Rejected!

Kickstarter’s vetting process was the most thorough of the three. Among other things, the site requires that campaign creators submit evidence of a working prototype of the device being funded.

Kickstarter is also strict about verifying identity. To create a Kickstarter account, we had to enter our full name, address, birth date, bank routing and account numbers, and the last four digits of our Social Security number.

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