A little more than one month ago we featured a Kickstarter campaign that was raising quite a lot of eyebrows and over half a million dollars. This particular product was a battery-free tag meant to be attached to anything you may lose in your daily life. It was supposed to communicate with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices and have a 200ft (60m) detection range.
The main claim was that the iFind could harvest enough power from existing RF fields inside a typical home environment to operate for centuries. As Kickstarter just cancelled its funding a few minutes ago it seems that the basic maths Hackaday did a while ago were correct and that the project was in fact a scam. We’ll direct our readers to this particular comment that sums up all the elements pointing to a fraudulent campaign and show you the email that the backers received:
A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter’s rules, which include:
- A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere
- Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project
- Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator
- Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners
Putting aside this news, this campaign’s cancellation raises a bigger question: why didn’t it happen before and how could we control Kickstarter campaigns? On a side note, it’s still very interesting to notice the nearly religious fervor of the sunk cost fallacy that such campaigns create in their comments.
Filed under: Ask Hackaday, Crowd Funding
