I do hope anyone who has invested does get their money back (or a printer - should it materialise - or better still - a release of the open scource files - so others can continue the development - assuming it ever existed in the first place) To protect investors and deter scammers, perhaps Kickstarter ought to consider placing some sort of safeguards in place by acting as a broker for the monies raised? Or some other mechanism - I really don’t know… personally, I’d prefer to buy a finished established product without the “wrinkles” - but that’s just me. Kickstarter seems to me, well open to folk who may wish to cynically mis-use and abuse the trust placed. I’m not saying this was the case here - but I strongly suspect it may well have been…
@william_foster rock party "shake that house to the foundations then take those.
half a mil? more like closer to a MILLON, so where is the rest of the money peachy guys hmmm, don’t mention the other revenue streams they had (like indigogo,etc.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ain1y9_ZLuo&feature=autoshare here is rich’s video and is great take on the matter and accounting…
@David_Clunie dont forget he still to finish the peachy house!
What’s spooky are the people on the KS comments thread willing to throw more money at it to get it to ship. Rich’s video post is spot on. This thing was likely doomed even without the alleged misappropriation of funds.
I actually believe it to be true. You don’t make an interview with someone who tells you that they made a mistake by stealing 300k. The person that stole the money would never do that. Also, there is a link with evidence, and an email address for the police officer leading the investigation. Now, they’re not going to do that if the police isn’t aware of this problem. I can recommend this video where Angus over at Maker’s Muse gives you his thoughts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_5Dmnagr4M
The point Angus, and many others when commenting around the Internet, is that the numbers provided don’t add up. The project received more funding than the the KS money to the tune of US$50k more not including the Indiegogo funding. It didn’t look like they were close to getting it shipped even if they had all the KS money and didn’t have to do any other funding. They would have been short either way.
Additionally, there isn’t any detail in the expense charts. If you are paying $400k/year in salary of which you and your brother are half the number on payroll much of the time, that’s an issue. It appears that it didn’t work, or at least work well and by the time they got toward the end they realized it wasn’t going to work. With 2 years and more than $600k in payroll with basically nothing to show means there were operational issues well beyond missing the couple hundred grand.
Nevertheless. stealing 330k is a huge problem for a business, that’s more than half of their financial assets.
The total amount of funding was about $US1.2 mil counting all sources of which reportedly about $220k was missing factoring in what payments were made. Still a sizable amount but nowhere near half.
There Canadian. I am a backer and was very troubled by this. They put all there files on Github.