It’s the ultimate Kickstarter horror story: You help fund a project. They succeed. They stop sending out updates. Their website expires. And nearly two years later, it’s become clear that they’ve disappeared with your money.


In December of 2013, gamers paid over $30,000 to fund a Kickstarter for a game called Mansion Lord. A month later, Mansion Lord’s creators opened up a PayPal account to accept even more money. And in August of 2014, after announcing that the PayPal funding round was over, they simply disappeared.

For over a year now, the Kickstarter creators—who call themselves Golgom Games—have been totally MIA. They haven’t updated the Kickstarter or their social media pages, and their website has expired. Most Mansion Lord backers have given up on ever seeing the game they were promised.


“We have tried contacting Kickstarter but were basically told tough luck it’s for you and the creator to work out,” one Mansion Lord backer told me. “But they have given us no way to reach them.”

Perhaps that should’ve been an early warning sign: the Mansion Lord Kickstarter page has no contact information or even names of the people behind it. A registration lookup reveals that the golgomgames.com domain was registered by someone named Michael Wong, who lists two different addresses on various registrations—one in California and one in Texas. But Wong has deleted most of the websites registered in his name.

I’ve reached out to both the e-mail address and phone number listed for Wong on various WHOIS lookups, but haven’t been able to reach a human being. I’ve found some other information on Wong as well, but I’m going to hold off on publicizing everything until I’m clearer on who he is and what happened here. If you know more about Wong or anyone else behind Mansion Lord, hit me up. We plan to keep following this one.

You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.