Spotting The Kickstarter Scammers

People ask me about running Kickstarter campaigns all the time. I usually give them my standard dire warnings pieces of advice:

First, from the day you conceive of the Kickstarter, to the day you launch, and to the day it ends, your job is to promote your campaign every day. Congratulations, you now have a second day job as a Marketing Director.

The second thing I tell them is that unless you fund on the first day, Kickstarter will be your biggest source of anxiety, so if anxiety shuts you down then Kickstarter may not be for you.

But after launching my latest campaign, Shaolin Nun - the Complete First Series:

I think I need to give another piece of advice, and that’s how to Spot the Scammers.

The scammers are the folks (or bots) who contact you and offer to send your campaign to their list of “Super-Backers”. In my experience that list doesn’t actually exist and you won’t get any new backers for your money. You would be better off buying a Facebook ad (which will net you around 3 backers, but at least you’ll get something for your money).

I’ve gotten so many offers from these folks who will take your money with the promise of sending you to their alleged super-backer lists, I don’t trust any of them. I call them the Listless.

Lately they’ve gotten more insidious and, like cockroaches, seem to have multiplied exponentially. Here are the two types of Listless you need to look out for:

From the minute you start your campaign you will get two types of emails. The first are from marketing folks who promise to help you extend the reach of your campaign. I’ve never taken them up on their offer, but they seem mostly harmless.

Then there are the Kickstarter Fakers. Who will send you an email that appears to be from Kickstarter:

I mean, it says it’s from Kickstarter Support, it has the Kickstarter logo at the top, it identifies itself as Kickstarter in the opening sentence, and it has a Kickstarter-like footer. Must be legit, right?

The first red flag is if you look at the email address, it’s from kickstarterspotlight8@gmail.com. If an email is going to come from Kickstarter, it will come directly from the URL, for example: [someone]@kickstarter.com or no-reply@kickstarter.com. Also look for kickstartercommunityteam@gmail.com, or really anything with an ending that isn’t kickstarter.com.

This Listless offers to put you in touch with “experienced marketing teams,” which seems benign until you agree and get spammed with emails from dozens of different marketers, all offering to send you to their lists of super-backers. Kickstarter Fakers are a Listless clearinghouse. This will also put you on a list to be spammed by “marketers” every time you launch a new Kickstarter campaign.

Additionally, I got an email from a Kickstarter Faker this week promising me they’d help me get the “Project We Love” status by, again, offering to put me in touch with more Listless. Only Kickstarter can grant you “Project We Love” status.

I mark the emails as spam and delete them as they come in.

The other Listless gives you hope, only to take it away a few hours later. These guys come in on the first day of your campaign and pledge at a high level, making you think you’re actually going to sell your most expensive reward. But they always post a comment with their backing. Here are a some examples from this campaign:

You may already notice how similar their messages are. All of them say something about not preferring to communicate on Kickstarter and want you to email them directly. I also like how they try to obfuscate their email address in some way, like they’re afraid of getting spammed. All of them want to talk to you about your campaign. Two of them state exactly what they want to talk about, the third just “wanted to ask a quick question for clarification.”

Within an two hours of getting these pledges and their messages, each one of them cancelled their pledge.

The first one selected The Shaolin Arsenal Bundle for $115.

The second one was a bit more conservative and grabbed the Metal Variant cover reward for $60.

The third was kind enough to just select the first reward on the list, Shaolin Nun #6 Digital for $5.

With the added shipping cost for the first two, this Listless scam promised and took away $200. That’s $200 I have to make up down the line if I’m going to hit my fundraising goal. Fortunately, knowing they were “Gives You Hope” scammers, I subtracted $200 from my day one total until they cancelled their pledges.

I’ve lost count of how many of these scam emails and messages I’ve gotten during this campaign (and it’s only been live for 4 days!) and my previous campaigns. I was getting emails after I launched the prelaunch page at the first of the month, that included emails from the Kickstarter Fakers that had phrasing like my campaign was already live.

Hopefully you now feel empowered with the knowledge of who these Listless scammers are, and how to spot them. I’ve suffered the pain they cause so you don’t have to.

To pay me back, please consider backing my Kickstarter Campaign today.

The Shaolin Nun on Kickstarter

Special thanks to Blake Morgan for suggesting this article. This was just going to be just a boring, “Support my Kickstarter Campaign” posting. I mean, it still is, but at least you learned something.