Artix
Want a terrible behind the scenes story about a scammer abusing Kickstarter?
This is also an important warning to any players who foolishly buy from code re-sellers offering deals that are "too good to be true." (Spoiler: If it is too good to be true, it probably is.) Click below to read more.
A scammer wrote a bot and bought tons of "Benevolent Founder Add-Ons" and then sold or gave out the codes. The credit card company detected the fraud and sent in the chargebacks to Kickstarter in batches. It totalled over $10,000. We do not have details of exactly what they did to make the payments (Kickstarter obviously does not share that kind of sensitive info) but we sure got hit by the chargebacks.
You might be thinking, "Hey, the Kickstarter went great, is a $10K hit really going to impact the project?" Of course, you are right. In the grand scheme of things, this will not impact the development of the game. But if you woke up and suddenly owed ten grand, imagine how you would feel. Even worse, I feel bad for all the players who are about to get screwed over by this scammer. All of those fraudulently acquired codes are about to be removed from the accounts using them. This includes all of the items obtained with the bad tokens. It looks like one of the scammer's strategies was to use the tokens to put items on accounts and sell them. We repeatedly say do not buy codes or accounts from resellers. The people who did are about to get seriously rug pulled by the scammer. Victims should be mad at the scammer... but we get the rage-filled support tickets.
If you or someone you know recently bought a Benevolent Add-On code from a reseller... you should do whatever you can to undo while you can. We made a list of every fraudulently-generated code and will start manually removing them once Kickstarter gives us the final word.
Well... that was not on my bingo card for the last day of September.
