WIRED / Reddit / Getty Images / vladwel

Crowdfunding can make a business, but occasionally, it forges a Jeffrey Batio. The inventor of a bizarre laptop-smartphone-tablet hybrid known as The Dragonfly Futurefön raised more than £500,000 in 2014 but never really delivered.

Batio’s story is one of hundreds found on r/ShittyKickstarters, a Reddit community of more than 90,000 subscribers exposing suspicious, potentially fraudulent or, well, shitty crowdfunding campaigns.


The catalyst for r/ShittyKickstarters came in a product called Triton, which was launched in 2016. Billed as the “world’s first artificial gills” the handlebar-like breathing apparatus defied belief, it even defied physics when unveiled in 2016, raising more than $100,000 in 24-hours through IndieGoGo.

A post from a u/exclamationmarek appeared soon after donators grew suspicious of Triton and Redditors got to work. Experts logged on, crunched numbers and debunked claims over a 994 comment analysis. Thanks in part to r/ShittyKickstarters Triton were exposed, and the man behind the venture Saeed R. Khademi was refunded $900,000 in donations.

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“It's entertaining to see people stage a demonstration that's obviously faked, and solving it is a little Easter egg hunt,” says Marek Baczynski, also known as u/exclamationmarek. After crowdfunding his own video game SUPERHOT in 2014 Baczynski grew to love Kickstarter’s ethos but hate its fraudsters. Now, he’s drawn to the “interesting community of investigators” he’s created.

“As crowdfunding became popular scammers found their way in,” says r/ShittyKickstarters mod u/Xaver. A hardware developer by day u/Xaver thinks crowdfunding platforms have inherent weaknesses that “allow scammers to make lots of cash very quickly without accountability.”


Not all the crowdfunding campaigns featured on the Shitstarter subreddit are suspicious. “A majority of the projects featured aren’t shams. They have elements that are unrealistic but the projects aren’t ill-intentioned,” argues fellow moderator u/jcpb.

“Many of the campaigns covered are akin to what a snake-oil salesman does to real medicine,” adds page moderator u/meta_perspective, but deciding what is and isn’t ‘shitty’ is a murky area.

Recently posted to the forum was a sleek-yet-expensive salt holder called Salty. Designed for graphic designers, maybe, but is it ‘shitty’? That’s down to the community to judge. “We believe it's best to have as little control as possible and leave it to the Reddit upvote system to decide,” says Marek.

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Salty was largely proclaimed ‘un-shitty’ by the community but a single post can damage reputations. SMACH Z, a handheld games console, raised almost €500,000 with an aim to deliver in late 2016. So far, no consoles have been delivered, prompting YouTubers to accuse the Spanish company behind it of piecing together prototypes with sellotape. On r/ShittKickstarters, SMACH Z has been a regular target of vitriol.


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“It’s sad that there are people claiming our project is dishonest when the truth is we’re working very hard,” says SMACH Z CEO Daniel Fernandez. “The power of the internet and influencers on people’s mind is incredible.”

Mano Guiragossian, marketing manager for the smart wallet startup Volterman, agrees. “We faced some problems during the production which led us to postpone the shipping but that doesn't mean that we are fake or a scam,” says Guiragossian. “When people read this kind of content sometimes they believe it and lose their trust in the companies.”

Fernandez says it’s “difficult to estimate the exact damage the brand has suffered,” as a result of r/ShittyKickstarters, but although he’d prefer not to have his brand associated with the page, he sees the bright side. “These critical opinions have generated buzz and attention,” he says. “We hope these false statements will lose credibility once the console is available.”

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Kickstarter is against shady usage of its platform, obviously, but as Kickstarter spokesperson David Gallagher says, the company aims “to be quite clear about the fact that not all projects will go smoothly”.

A Trust page on the Kickstarter website states that its Integrity team is constantly “reviewing reports from the community”, and that they utilise “complex algorithms and automated tools to identify and investigate suspicious activity on projects”. An independent survey commissioned by Kickstarter also found that around nine per cent of projects fail to deliver, but that "there does not seem to be a systematic problem associated with failure (or fraud) on Kickstarter”.

“Once a project is funded, a legal contract is formed between the creator and the backers. Kickstarter is not a part of this contract, and it's up to the creator to fulfil their promises to backers,” Gallagher says. In that, Kickstarter encourages people to take a closer look.

“Public discussion of a project leads the creator to be more transparent, which is great for everyone,” says Gallagher. “But obviously, gratuitous public shaming or ridicule can be really harmful. It's easy to sit back and mock that person.”

The jury’s out on when SMACH Z will arrive. “We estimate that during the first quarter of 2019 we’ll have the final version ready. We are very close,” says Fernandez – but forum posts have sometimes caused unforeseen ripple effects.

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Arist, a Hong Kong-based coffee company, gained 2,519 backers who, at time of writing, put $845,139 towards its espresso invention. It's made frequent appearances on the subreddit.

It has been accused of failing to deliver products, allegedly posted fake reviews and fumbled product demonstrations – one such demonstration showed a fish tank pump siphoning cold water through a sieve of pre-ground coffee. Today, backers are still demanding refunds on its Kickstarter page.

Originally hailed as a beacon of innovation (and backed financially) by the Hong Kong government, since then, the case has “spurred concern that the Hong Kong government may not be conducting enough due diligence and oversight of startups,” wrote the South China Morning Post in 2015.

The Arist episode could have wider implications but r/ShittyKickstarters is guilty in feeding the hysteria too. “I see people on r/ShittyKickstarters claiming, 'It's from China, it has to be a scam', and startups begin hiding where they're from through prejudice,” says Baczynski. “It makes people have worse opinions on areas or nationalities.”

High-profile scams, vanity projects and viral jokes – $55,000 potato salad, anyone? – have all attributed to Kickstarter’s troubles. In 2016, its business declined for the first time, and from 2015 the number of submitted campaigns has fallen year on year by the thousands.

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In that, r/ShittyKickstarters see itself as a last line of defence. “Some of what we do feels like social justice,” says Baczynski. “But it feels like I'm doing something.”

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