Wow. If this turns out to be a scam, and IGG is doing nothing about it and saying "none of this stuff that looks terribly like a scam seems to be a scam so just go ahead and give them money", they should be liable.
Ok, if it's not a scam, I will happily eat my words. But if it is, I almost don't see the problem with the company itself but rather with how the platform is handling this.
> Ok, if it's not a scam, I will happily eat my words. But if it is, I almost don't see the problem with the company itself but rather with how the platform is handling this.
So if this is all a big scam you "almost don't see the problem" with the company trying to pull off the scam? The blame should lay squarely on the platform?
Are you serious?
Like, I understand that the platform should take responsibility for their vetting procedures, but to suggest they are more responsible then the company that is trying to pull the scam is fucking nuts.
I guess this is just another notch on the "fuck you got mine" belt that seems to be fairly common on HN. If you can think up a good business that doesn't have to deliver and you can get away with it or shift the blame to someone else, you get a pat on the back and are absolved of any responsibility!
Nobody trusts a Moscow-based company with a lawyer and PR office in the US. To see this, simply set up a single webpage with a Paypal button advertising for this product. You will get money, but probably not 1M$.
On the other hand, people seem to trust IGG and Kickstarter (at least to some extent). This can be demonstrated easily by observing that content which would – on a normal website – not collect any funding seems to do well on these platforms.
So, no, it is not entirely about criminal responsibility, but about a misuse of trust, trust that IGG has and which it conferred to some company by letting them use their platform.
To me this is very much like security breaches. If security breaches didn't exist, we wouldn't need security and we then wouldn't have security. The blame should be on the insecure software, not the ones abusing it (those get a different kind of blame; legal repercussions).
There's plenty of blame for everyone. Kickstarter/Indiegogo are basically scam incubators: they provide some basic help getting scams off the ground, connecting cons with dupes, and take their cut. The Scam Founders they support get to try out various pitches until they find one that works.
http://pando.com/tag/healbe/
Wow. If this turns out to be a scam, and IGG is doing nothing about it and saying "none of this stuff that looks terribly like a scam seems to be a scam so just go ahead and give them money", they should be liable.
Ok, if it's not a scam, I will happily eat my words. But if it is, I almost don't see the problem with the company itself but rather with how the platform is handling this.
I am very curious to see how this develops.