This was really fascinating to read where when it comes to the world of crowdfunding it can be the golden ticket small businesses need in terms of getting exposure and money to help turn their ideas into a reality. At the same time, there are a ton of fake listings that simply end up being a scam. For example, certain creators of a project on a Kickstarter or Indiegogo never intend to release anything. Instead they spend all the money received on a new car and then just either disappear or claim the company didn’t work out.
This one was intriguing though as it dealt with a product listing called X-TRA Battery which from what I gather is supposed to be a large capacity battery for cameras. They have a ton of backers too as the figure shows they accumulated more than $200,000. To get to that figure apparently a ton of media outlets and individuals have been promoting them as an affiliate where they should get some money for every person they refer. However, apparently they weren’t being paid as promised and so alarm bells started to go off. Especially when these affiliates were claiming the company became non responsive.
That led to people releasing pictures of who people believe is the CEO, Jeffery Parker, to semi conclude that the person is fake. What people are suggesting is that the CEO in the marketing material is actually a model of some sort who may have been paid to be the face as you can say.
The reason being is you can apparently find the same guy`s face on so many other marketing and print work. When I looked at the videos too actually none of them had the person actually talking as well. So did people get scammed? To me another interesting thing is how if it is a scam they sure got a lot of companies to promote them where it didn’t seem like anyone did their due diligence ahead of time which is a bit scary on its own.