Looking at Kickstarter, you would probably wonder whether any of the project owners ever try to scam the project backers. What you wouldn’t think though is how a backer could also be scamming the campaign creators. According to reports that surfaced yesterday, a Kickstarter backer had done exactly this. Today, the website has confirmed that it has identified the user who reportedly made commitments to 100 different campaigns. Reports say that the user pledges to all the campaigns and waited for the rewards to be shipped and then disputed the credit card charge. Eventually, the backer took both the reward and the money.
According to a report by The Verge, while such scams aren’t new, it brings a whole new issue for Kickstarter. The report quoted Alex Heberling, a cartoonist, who tweeted, “I am still waiting for the results of my appeal. Losing $1,000 will ruin me if the credit card company sides with Encik Farhan.” Heberling was the one to first bring the issues to notice. The scammer was a pledger by the name of Encik Farhan.
While Farhan’s account is not active any longer, Kickstarter has reportedly also banned the user responsible for the over 100 malicious pledges. “Kickstarter and Amazon Payments, our US payments processor, were recently alerted to a series of malicious pledges by a single individual to more than 100 Kickstarter projects,” Kickstarter told The Verge in a statement. “Upon learning this information, we shut down this person’s account, canceled their live pledges, and permanently banned them from Kickstarter,” the company told The Verge.
