Friday, May 13, 2016

A possible scam at Kickstarter?


I don't venture over to Kickstarter and similar crowdfunding sites very often, so I'm not sure how many scams or con artists are to be found there.  However, Christopher Burg has uncovered what he claims is an obvious scam.

This is what a scam looks like. The product being offered is not only impossible but the entire writeup makes no sense within the framework of the market they’re aiming at. Scam might not even be the correct word for this. I would hope a scam artist would put some effort into making their scam at least appear somewhat believable. The people involved in this page didn’t even accomplish that much! DataGateKeeper’s team are scam artists who couldn’t even create a convincing scam. They’re basically failures who failed at failing.

At this point, when social media backlash destroys any chance of this Kickstarter getting funded, I’m expecting them to claim that this was all an elaborate troll. It really is their only option.

There's much more at the link.  Click over there and read it for yourself, particularly if you're a computer security geek.

I suppose we can't rely on Kickstarter to evaluate such projects.  After all, their disclaimer states:

"Kickstarter doesn't evaluate a project's claims, resolve disputes, or offer refunds — backers decide what's worth funding and what's not."

Peter

2 comments:

Akatsukami said...

Dunno. I haven't read all the claims, so I can't speak as to their merits. To the left, about 30 years, someone made the "obviously fraudulent" claim that they had a method to compress any file to 16 bytes. A colleague and I figured out how to do this in less than a day.

The second half of Arthur C. Clarke's First Law is, "When [a distinguished but elderly scientist] says that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong". That statement is worded a bit strongly, but it's worth remembering.

Larry said...

Compressing a file to 16 bytes is easy. Uncompressing it without data loss is the real trick. I have my doubts about that because no one is doing it.