With systems like Kickstarter, where creators put their hands out in the hopes that someone will shower them in money, there is a guarantee that shady business will inevitably follow. In the case of Elementary, My Dear Holmes, a puzzle game based around the iconic British crime investigator and his loyal sidekick, Kickstarter has shut down the project’s page due to the possibility that fraudulent accounts were used to artificially pump money in and boost the final donation amount. Why boost your pledges? Kickstarter has an all or nothing system, the campaign must reach its goal in the time allotted, otherwise they will receive nothing.
The folks in the Kickstarter comments have gone through a ton of data, noting several hundred fake accounts that had been created around the same time one month prior to the Kickstarter, only to back Holmes as their first project. Accounts created in alphabetical order with random fake names, random fake towns, and random fake pictures as their profile. One account even used the picture of an Allegheny woman who has been missing since 2011.
Ouya also has a promotion called Free The Game, where they will match any Kickstarter pledge that is successfully funded to the tune of at least $50 grand, as well as $100 grand to whoever raises the most money during this promotion. Ouya’s other headline game for the Free The Games campaign is also under scrutiny for artificially inflating their funding, with $114 grand coming from just 167 backers as of this writing (Or $685 per backer average, $30 grand coming from three backers), with a majority of backers not requesting any pledge rewards and a majority having only pledged for that one project. Whether Kickstarter will suspend that campaign in its last day will have to be seen.
MMO Fallout 