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Peachy Printer Funds Embezzled To Build New Home Instead of $100 3D Printer (hackaday.com)
Reader szczys writes (edited): Peachy Printer made it big on Kickstarter, raising over half a million dollars on the promise to build the first 3D printer and scanner costing $100. The company has now collapsed due to embezzlement (Editor's note: BBC's coverage is better) of those funds. The original investor stole around $350,000 of backer's money and funneled it into a new home. This was discovered about 18 months ago but became public only now as the company is unable to meet their already delayed delivery dates. Peachy Printer has posted a video admitting the screw-up. Sounds familiar?
Is there any precedent for legal action against someone for doing this? Or can I just make a kickstarter, never fulfill it at all, buy a new car and there's no consequences?
I am utterly shocked, that they didn't use the fund to build the printers and use the printer to print parts for the house...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Well, a significant difference between this situation and the iFind is that the Peachy Printer actually works. It even works well, compared to the $800+ solidoodle at our hackerspace. It was working well enough to clean up the design and start shipping kits back in January 2015. Sadly, that also coincided with discovering the money reserved for actually making the printers was held up as collateral for David's house. (which turned out to not be the truth anyway) David kept stringing us along for a while, while Rylan explored other ways to raise some money to ship. And, if you've watched the videos and read the website you know the rest.
Peachy printer backers, don't fret. I'll be launching a Kickstarter soon for a printer which can print an entire house. Back me for $100 and I'll post an approximate sketch of the house. Back me for $500 and I'll send you photocopies of the plans. Back me for $1000 (top tier Rube Level) and I'll send you a postcard from the country it's located in. Act now!
Most Kickstarters don't even produce a house.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Depends on the state. If I recall, your primary residence (home) can't be seized regardless of how it was paid for. I've heard all sorts of VC scams in which the fund directly went into the building of a house. It's a one-trick pony scam. Your reputation is screwed, but for some people, it's ok, they only have 30+ years of their life or less with retirement.
Correct if I'm wrong, please.
Life is not for the lazy.
Well, the really sad thing about this is we had a working printer in January 2015. It's finicky, sure, but so is our Solidoodle. Not only did we have a working printer, but it would have been profitable at $100.
Even if the article is a dupe, deleting it is not a good thing if there are unique comments attached to it!
One of the best features of Slashdot compared to just about every other comment system on the Internet is that posts are (supposed to be) immutable and accessible forever, perhaps modded down but never deleted.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I don't know Canadian law, but in some Western countries, embezzlement of this sort would be considered a crime. So, even if there is no recourse for contributors, if the guy goes to jail it may deter other Canadians from pulling a stunt like this.
As for investors, no, there probably isn't any legal recourse. However, the others running the project probably have grounds to sue him for the actual funds plus a separate action for taking actions that he knew, or should have known, would hurt the reputation of the others who were running the project. Unless the value of the house is high enough to recover the lost money though, "good luck" collecting any damages.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
One of the things that stuck in my mind about the video (aside from the cheesy feel sorry for me video editing) was that he said they didn't have a corporate account for the funds to arrive in, so they chose his personal account?
I live in a 3rd world country (South Africa), and it takes me 1 minute to set up a new bank account with shared access credentials with my existing bank. This means the account is completely separate from all other of my accounts, and I can create as many logins as I want for it with as much access as I want (read-only, read-write, which accounts they can see etc). This has proved massively useful when sharing a household with others. Open an account and set up access profiles for spending for certain people in 30min. Why can't people doing Kickstarter type campaigns do the same when they are trying to start a business.
Someone who has read Kickstarter's terms more recently will need to chime in. But I was under the impression that as a contributor, you are basically just donating your money for nothing more than a promise. When I read through the EULA long ago, I seem to recall something about acknowledging the project may fail and I may see nothing in return for my money.
That's one of the things I don't like about the current crop of crowd-funding sites. They're slanted very much in favor of the recipient and against the donor. With most VC funding, the donor gets partial ownership of the company in exchange for their money, if not a say in how the company is run. Crowdsourcing right now is the donor takes all the risk, while the project owners reap all the rewards. It baffles me that the Internet, which usually slants heavily left on issues like this, tolerates it. Maybe people are thinking of it in terms of large VC firms vs. little guys in the garage trying to get their project rolling? Well, why do you think VC firms became so big? So donors could pool their resources to detect scammers and crooks who'd make empty promises to try to take your money.
Love the idea of Kickstarter because most people are nice and want to do nice, but... The lack of accountability is a FATAL flaw in the implementation.
So here's a constructive suggestion for a solution I call the "charity share brokerage":
The brokerage will earn a commission on the funded projects based on providing IMPORTANT supporting services for proposal preparation and evaluation of the results. In particular, the brokerage will make sure that EACH proposal has:
1. A realistic schedule
2. An adequate budget
3. The critical resources (including the people) and all of them are available
4. No gaps (such as insufficient testing for a software-related project)
5. SUCCESS CRITERIA
The projects should NOT be over-pledged, which is the critical flaw in Kickstarter's business model (and the other such websites I've studied). They allow over-pledging because they take a flat percentage and more money in the project is more money for them. Instead, when the project is funded, that's it. They earn their percentage for "meta-expertise" in preparing project proposals and evaluating project results.
After the project has been completed, the brokerage applies the success criteria and reports the results to all of the donors and to any websites that were linked to supporting the project proposal.
My new motto is "More detailed suggestions available upon polite request, but I'm not holding my breath." After all, everything is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
A man's home is his castle, everyone needs a place to live, regardless of any other considerations.
So he can go live in the penitentiary. When your home is paid for with embezzled funds, it never belonged to you. Untold millions (billions?) of people in this world don't own their own home, if for no other reason than they aren't thieving dickbags. Why should this guy get to keep that big ass house that he essentially stole? There are far greater people who spend their nights sleeping on the streets.
"He worked in Northern Alberta as a heavy duty mechanic"
When I read this, I nearly stopped reading further, but curiosity conquered me.
Sorry, but the qualifications floor me.
"David hired an Accounting and Financial Consulting firm to assist in the management of Peachy Printer's finances."
Yup, surely THEY did a great job. Recourse here? I'm betting they did nothing but dip their beaks.
"Due to the fact that the Kickstarter campaign was over before Peachy Printer existed as a corporation, we did not have a corporate bank account set up to receive the funds. As a result, David’s personal account was set up to receive the funds."
Oh, here is where it went bad. I would have left it at Kickstarter until the corporate account was ready.
From here on, it's faith in others, failed human beings, and predictable outcomes.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I think they need a rule that first-time project owners are only allowed to collect up to 200% of their "goal" amount. Once the project hits that number, the "PLEDGE NOW" button goes away.
That limits the amount of damage that a first-time project owner can do. It doesn't prevent them getting the money they need to get the business started - plus a healthy "win" for doing a great job. But it would prevent viral projects from dumping so much money into someone's lap that they become intimidated by the magnitude of the task and find it easier to take the money and run than to complete the project.
Once someone has proved themselves and delivered as promised, they can try again without the cap.
Having run 5 successful Kickstarters myself, most of them 400% or more over goal - I understand how daunting it can be. When the project is running, a kind of "red mist" descends and pushing the total higher and higher becomes highly compelling. When the countdown expires and you suddenly realize that you're tens of thousands of dollars better off - it's exhilarating. But the next morning, when you start to realize the magnitude of what you've just signed up to do...it can be very daunting.
It's also very difficult to plan a project when you don't know whether you'll sell 100 widgets or 100,000 widgets. When you go from "Oh - I can just 3D print that component at home - and solder that switch to the circuit board myself!" to "I've got to get a $10,000 mold made by a company in China and I have to fly out there to make sure it's OK - then find a factory that can solder that switch on for me."...suddenly things get much more serious.
It's exceedingly difficult to design, price and schedule production on a product where you have literally ZERO idea how many you'll sell.
So for that first project - make it so I'll know that I'm selling between 100 and 200 widgets.
www.sjbaker.org