Kickstarter’s success has made a lot of people pay attention to the concept of crowdfunding. At it’s best, crowdfunding investment allows fans of an artist to send her money to directly support her work, and get something special out of it. At it’s worst, it’s photoshopped fake products, dubious consumer electronics and videogame projects from the implausible to outright scams.
Crowdfunding sites provide a fairly simple service: they allow people to list products on their website, provide a discussion forum and allow people interested in the project to pay money (after the crowdfunding site skims 5-10% off the top) to the project backers. The project backers promise something in return for the payment – from one or more of the actual product being developed, if it’s every released, down to a simple “thanks!’ on a website. That’s something that makes perfect sense in the original KickStarter artist fan-club world, but also allows attempts to fund tech startups to avoid SEC requirements on both the startup and the crowdfunding company. Those SEC requirements were put in place many years ago to make it more difficult for scam-artists to swindle people in the guise of investing in a worthless company…
What does this have to do with spam? Well, if you’re going to set up a spam campaign of some sort – whether it’s for a real product, or an outright scam – there are several things that are very useful to have: A website that looks plausible, and won’t be taken down by the webhost. A way to accept money, ideally via online credit card payments. And a way to control discussion about your product, so that you can maintain an appearance of legitimacy and build buzz, while keeping naysayers from dissuading potential customers would be perfect.
That’s exactly what the crowdfunding sites offer. Some of them – KickStarter, for one – are very aware of the potential for abuse. Not only do they do some basic checks potential projects for legitimacy, but they have – and enforce – acceptable use policies to deter bad behaviour. Others, like IndieGoGo, don’t.
I got this spam out of the blue:
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