Grinds My Gears: Kickstarter Scams
Grinds My Gears: Kickstarter Scams
You should know that I can't stand this kind of chaos.
*Disclaimer: This is a transcript of audio edition that is attached at the bottom, so forgive any extras “and’s” and “um’s”.*
As I spend more and more time working on Kickstarters—building the pages, and then actually running the entire campaign, fulfilling it, and all that kind of stuff—one thing has become really clear: scammers have made everything so much more difficult. This time around, I launched a campaign, and I'm now inundated with, I don't know, 200 to 250 plus different scam emails across different platforms like Kickstarter, even on my Facebook, both business and personal, and even LinkedIn. I'm getting constant barrages of messages from people who, in the end, just want to send me a list of like 2,000 emails and then let me figure out the rest. For anyone who does not know, it's completely unbeneficial and creates more work for yourself without an ROI.
Sometimes I get playful with some of them, questioning and making them send me campaigns they claim to have helped with. Then I email those creators and send them back screenshots when those creators say, "I have no idea who these people are." The problem I want to address here is what occurred this time. Because I was inundated with messages, what I realized after sifting through all of them is that I missed a few different messages from potential backers and backers who were asking questions. If I hadn't taken the time to look through all these messages, I would have completely missed it, and I think that's ridiculous.
I am hopeful and prayerful that at some point, Kickstarter will give us an opportunity to find a way to filter out these kinds of spam messages. I understand people can create new accounts and keep doing the same thing, but there has to be a better way. If anyone knows about Facebook, you might realize that it was a big thing for a long time, getting constant scam messages. I believe they're still out there, but there were certain settings that you could put on your profile account to either limit them or get rid of them completely. I've since been able to do that. Even on TikTok, I only get like one or two a month. So I know it can be done, and I'm hoping Kickstarter will take the initiative to do this because it can be absolutely detrimental to our campaigns when we miss messages from people who have a simple question that would push them over the edge to become a backer and support our projects.
For smaller campaigns like mine, I need those backers, those numbers, and those supporters. This is how we grow our fanbase, distribute our books, and I would like to continue to see that grow. So, this is me taking a moment and telling everybody how ridiculous it is that these scammers have completely inundated Kickstarter with constant brushes of messages. And as I always close out, do better, be better.