Yesterday I ran a piece about Encik Farham, an alleged Kickstarter scammer who pledged funding at the top tier of over a hundred projects, only to then seemingly run a credit dispute when each project was funded. Kickstarter have sent an official response to the news, acting immediately to curb the scammer.

In the piece, I spoke to Alex Heberling, one of the many creators whose projects had been affected by the scam – and could have lost $1000 from her funding as a result. Kickstarter pulled the profile of Farham just prior to the piece going up, taking it offline, and today contacted me with the following statement:

Kickstarter and Amazon Payments, our US payments processor, were recently alerted to a series of malicious pledges by a single individual to more than 100 Kickstarter projects. Upon learning this information, we shut down this person’s account, canceled their live pledges, and permanently banned them from Kickstarter.

Kickstarter and Amazon are working together to investigate this situation. We won’t let a single bad apple harm the integrity or goodwill of our incredible community. Indeed, Kickstarter have managed to shut this down remarkably quickly, to their thorough credit. Now that this particular form of scam has been caught, it looks as though the company will now be on-guard for any further attempts to repeat the trick. If your Kickstarter is ever affected by an attempted scam such as this one – please let people know about it.