1/ There are gullible (not necessarily dumb, by the way) people everywhere, why would Kickstarter's user base be exempt from that? Besides, Kickstarter is fairly mainstream now, so there's no reason to think it's only frequented by well-informed technology enthousiasts. The point is that they're trying to target the most gullible fraction of the website's user base, not that all of it consists of naive people.
2/ You claim it's not effective. However, it looks like they're close to reaching their goal with 300+ backers and almost 40k in pledges, so it seems to me like it works.
3/ "Either way the project gets caught at an early stage and cancelled."
This doesn't seem true. This project hasn't been taken down so far, and it looks like they were only discovered today after having run for long enough to collect 40k in pledges. Had these (alledged) scammers been more modest (40k goal, earlier deadline) they would have gotten away with it.
Besides, Kickstarter has had several cases of fraud and scam recently, so it looks like their Trust&Safety procedure has not fully matured yet (which is normal since they've recently grown big enough that this is enough of a concern to create a dedicated department). This is a concern big crowdsourcing platforms are starting to face, and for working in the fraud detection space and often discussing these matters with other tech companies I can say it's still something fairly new to them.
4/ All this discussion is completely besides the original point I was trying to make. Whether this particular instance is going to go through or not, my point was that there is something interesting about scammers in that they seem to (consciously or not) have their own culture and implicit codes, one of which being this very specific type of communication that seems egregious to most of us but could drive better conversion among their target population. I thought this was an interesting/amusing thought, but you're free to disagree.
1/ There are gullible (not necessarily dumb, by the way) people everywhere, why would Kickstarter's user base be exempt from that? Besides, Kickstarter is fairly mainstream now, so there's no reason to think it's only frequented by well-informed technology enthousiasts. The point is that they're trying to target the most gullible fraction of the website's user base, not that all of it consists of naive people.
2/ You claim it's not effective. However, it looks like they're close to reaching their goal with 300+ backers and almost 40k in pledges, so it seems to me like it works.
3/ "Either way the project gets caught at an early stage and cancelled." This doesn't seem true. This project hasn't been taken down so far, and it looks like they were only discovered today after having run for long enough to collect 40k in pledges. Had these (alledged) scammers been more modest (40k goal, earlier deadline) they would have gotten away with it. Besides, Kickstarter has had several cases of fraud and scam recently, so it looks like their Trust&Safety procedure has not fully matured yet (which is normal since they've recently grown big enough that this is enough of a concern to create a dedicated department). This is a concern big crowdsourcing platforms are starting to face, and for working in the fraud detection space and often discussing these matters with other tech companies I can say it's still something fairly new to them.
4/ All this discussion is completely besides the original point I was trying to make. Whether this particular instance is going to go through or not, my point was that there is something interesting about scammers in that they seem to (consciously or not) have their own culture and implicit codes, one of which being this very specific type of communication that seems egregious to most of us but could drive better conversion among their target population. I thought this was an interesting/amusing thought, but you're free to disagree.