Kickstarter Cancels Aluminium Dice Fraud

February 27, 2013 4 Comments

A lot of things go on Kickstarter these days, but they do crack down on the blatant violations after all. Yesterday, Kickstarter closed a project for Aluminium Dice, which were exposed by users as existing product. It appears the project-creator (since deleted by Kickstarter) wanted to re-sell these dice through Kickstarter, passing them off as his own creation. His apparently obvious lack of knowledge in machinery, tooling or the physics of balanced dice gave him away.

Aluminium Dice – No longer on Kickstarter

Hurray For A Vigilant Community

One one hand, I applaud the people who revealed the fraud. It’s good to know that people are out there, watching for and exposing fraud. Fraudsters on the internet aren’t exactly breaking news, but I think it bears reminding that there are (it seems) preciously few initial safeguards on Kickstarter as to what projects get launched in the first place.

There are a great many and fantastic projects on Kickstarter. Some of the best and most creative stuff done in the past years came through Kickstarter, and more is sure to come.

Clearly, this isn’t the last time I’ll blog about Kickstarter-projects either (though hopefully more about the fun, creative and, most importantly, genuine ones).

But you can get scammed on Kickstarter, and the success people have on the platform will clearly draw more scammers. A smarter fraud might not be noticed before your money left the bank.

Stay alert!

Orlando the Technicoloured

I saw this mentioned on the Reaper Miniatures forum, and the folk there were pointing to another apparent ‘reseller’ scam the same person seems to be setting up on indiegogo (not yet live) and are planning to try and get that killed too if it does happen
http://pinsofwar.net/ Zweischneid

Well… to a degree it helps that this one was self-correcting thanks to people like you.

I like the look of your Kickstarter. Since you’re an expert on dice, would you perhaps consider a short guest-blog-post on producing and/or balancing dice? Could help promote your current KS too.

I’d ask for an interview, which I do with game designers, but I wouldn’t even know what questions to ask without looking like a fool
- Sly Kly
  
  I wouldn’t deem myself a Dice expert. I am a Mechanical Engineer who studied Manufacturing Processes and I would call myself a Novice machinist.
  I love that I can think about something in my mind, design it in Solidworks, and then watch it take shape from a block of material on a CNC mill.
  If you could send me some examples of a guest blog post I will consider writing something up.
  - http://pinsofwar.net/ Zweischneid
    
    I don’t think I have good examples in case.
    
    The one I have is more the kind I’d rather not have… a company pitch without much of a genuine article at its core.
    
    For a post.. dunno. Blog stuff tends to be light reading, things people will skim at work or on a smart phone: short sentences and paragraphs.
    
    Something like
    
    - 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Dice
    
    or
    
    - 5 Steps to making a perfectly balanced die/dice