Slashdot Mirror
Plastc Swiped $9 Million From Backers, Now It Plans To File For Bankruptcy and Shut Down (theverge.com)
Plastc announced today that it is planning to file for bankruptcy and will shut down on April 20, 2017, after raising more than $9 million through preorders and shipping to no backers. "Plastc launched in 2014 with the promise of shipping a single card that could digitally hold 20 credit or debit cards that a user could switch between," reports The Verge. From the report: With that, all backers' money is lost, and no Plastc cards will ship. Plastc announced the news on its website today along with the fact that all its employees have been laid off. Its customer care and social media channels have also been shut down. The company explains that it thought it would close $3.5 million in funding in February this year, but that fell through. Another possible investment deal of $6.75 million fell through, too. What's not clear is how more than $9 million wasn't sufficient to get backers their orders. Backers will likely have questions and want their money back, but with no one to turn to from Plastc, they'll likely be out the cash.
Uh, guys? You check the calendar? You're a little late with this story, don't you think?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Bettr thn gret, fantastc!
I don't think it is possible or legal to move the information from your bank card to another. The chip is a small computer, it can run programs, do encryption, store keys. Just impossible.
If one were to look at the long term history of the financial industry (going back to before wall street was wall street), you'd find bankers, stock brokers et al were inherently distrusted. Financial fraud is/was easy so they did it... Over and over and over.
This is why there has historically been heavy regulation and oversight.
I did not fund this one, but these guys: https://popslate.com/ took my money and still have that website up (though it does say that their models are "sold out"). Message this March that they would not be refunding or fulfilling orders.
Dumb ass millennials say "oh I am investing in this glorious business"
except it's just some idiot making promises that can't be met and then the idiot runs off with whatever money was pledged
Jeezuz, I've got one debit card.
Sign of the times I guess.
... be a shame if anything happened to it.
A fool on GoFundMe and his money are soon parted.
"It'll be like a universal remote, but for all your credit and debit cards." Anybody who invested in that deserved what they got.
Plastc Swiped
I see what you did there.
...having too many credit cards in your wallet was not one of them. Can't say I'm surprised it turned out to be a scam. The latest crowdfunded crap I've seen being promoted on Facebook: some shysters trying to convince investors that a Samsung Tablet with VNC installed on it is a novel invention.
These days, crowdfunding seems to be less garage/backyard tinkerers, and more already wealthy con artists using it as an easy source of income. Can't say I blame them - if I had the means to promote and profit from some idiotic "invention", I'd probably do that shit too. Anybody want to invest in my solar powered vinyl player which automatically uploads your music to the cloud? I swear, it's going to be the next big thing!
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I am sad that this didn't make it to market, the technology looked cool. I was planning to frame one instead of using it.
The three types of suckers are investors, clients and workers. The most profitable form is to steal from all three and keep the fraud rolling along indefinitely. That is the fundamental model for the financial industry. All the top banks, investment houses, hedge funds, etc skim the wealth generated in the country and put it in their own pockets. That's, along with regressive taxes, underlies the ever increasing wealth disparity between rich and poor.
So what do you think will happen to the scam artists who pulled this off? Will they suffer any economic or reputational damage? No way. They all got out fat and happy, and their business reputation will be enhanced because of their successful raid on a gullible public. I expect they will get better positions with larger companies because of their proven track record of theft.
I expect no change, although it might get worse. I just wish they would stop calling it capitalism.
Why is Snark Required?
Three years ago I did a small crowdfund for a solid state laser cutter; we got 300% funded, delivered our backers' orders in 120 days, and everyone was happy. Small problem: I tell people this now, and nobody takes me seriously because "oh, crowdfunding? must have been a scam of some kind".
I'm ready to go with my next product and since my last one was "too small scale" investors won't talk to me.
As usual, a cool new ecosystem was ruined by parasitoids and saprophytes.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Can't deliver, they'll shift their line of business into Pr0n, with that amount they can screw any teens who wanted cash.
takes off with the loot. This is just one more in a long string of heists that Americans have pulled off using crowdfunging websites. It's the American business model I guess, find someone who is willing to pay or invest, then just make off with the money, knowing very well there was a clause in the contracts or agreements that allowed you to.
If you're an American, you may have some chances to recover your money or investment. Which also gives the signal to Asians, Russians, and Europeans: if the business is American, be very careful before you buy in, because you have 0 chance of getting money back if it fails.
... they're still standing though
I bet the boys had great fun spunking $9m,their mistake was that they could con another bunch of fools every few years to keep the con going.
The way actually successful implementations of this idea work, is that the card is yet another chip with its own identity and keys, and you can register it as an authorized id at the other companies.
i.e.: you do not *copy* 20 different credit card on it, you ask your 20 credit companies to accept also the key inside this card as ID proof.
that works nicely because wireless NFC / RFID (and contact smartcards for the LUDDITES! still using that ;-) ) is standardized, meaning that in practice it really all boils down to "accept yet another key", there is no real need to modify hardware.
---
(And yes my second example is a plain watch which also has an RFID chip. Not a smartwatch with software controlled NFC. It completely predates the Apple Watch craze by a few years. And actually works with way much more different ski resorts accross europe than advertised).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Granted, it doesn't change anything in your scenario, but given European chip 'n pin do connect, I doubt you attack would be feasible (ignoring the fact you need a 1000 unconnected terminals, which is doing to be very hard to find).
That attack would definitely be feasible.
*BUT* the unconnected terminals would be limited to a small amount only.
So at the end of the day, the bank only loses a couple of thousands of EUR, (Well within something they can live with)
or bounces the transaction back and a thousands of shops are a few dozens bucks back. (Again, well within something they'll survive with)
Contact less payment are basically the same but even lower (only a few bucks are accepted without asking for a PIN)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's why 'plastic' could never mimic a chip card; because to mimic the behaviour and 'signing capabilities' of such a card would require knowing that secret information along with associated algorithms
Or, inversely, it could hold its own sets of secret information, and the plastc compagny would register these as an acceptable form of ID / as altenate accepted signing to the other companies.
(I.e.: when you "copy" a credit card or an access card to it, what actually goes behind the curtain, is that in the DB of the bank or some other company the plastc is added as yet another accepted form of ID for you next to whatever contactless card / RFID fob you were already using).
At lest that's how it is actually implemented in the realworld by other companies that didn't go bust like plastc.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Actually, they're one of the copy-cat companies which jumped on the idea when the originating company published their idea. That company is still alive, though struggling. The biggest setback was chips. You're supposed to pay using your chip now, swiping is reserved for the restroom. These multi-card cards don't have chips.
Some do.
The idea is that you're not trying to *copy* the data from the source card's chip to the multicard's chip.
The mutlicard's chip has it's own private credential on the chip.
What you do is you register said credential as yet another acceptable ID at the other company.
(So the company isn't accepting only info of Card A - that also got copied on card B. But the company is accepting any of the private key on the chips of either card A or card B).
I can open a shared car with my train pass, because the carsharing company accepts to recognize the train pass as also identifying me.
This concept has been popular for ages for ski passes across european ski resorts : nearly all companies accept each others wireless cards (to the point that it even ended up in wrist watches).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
So what is the alternative though? Middle men who evaluate prospective investments and allocate your savings accordingly? That is basically how the financial world outside crowdfunding works, and the result has been that central banks have to keep bailing out the bad investments to the point where almost every asset class is detached from any fundamental valuation, and people are paying governments to borrow money from them.
I actually think we are closer to a working system in crowdfunding. Yes there are a huge number of scams and failures, but these quite obviously exist in almost every other investment market. Just look at how things like LIBOR were rigged to understand that an official regulated system is no protection against the same sort of people who might try to take you for a ride on kickstarter. The difference on crowdfunding sites is that it is relatively easy for someone who has done a bit of research into a business to figure out whether the idea is a scam (for example, using basic science). The other thing about these sites is that nobody is crying for the people who lose money on these things. This is how it should be. People waste money all the time. The main problem is when they waste money and then the taxpayer runs to the rescue to bail them out. That crowdfunding still has the notion of buyer-be-ware about it seems quite healthy.
I imagine as these things develop (and move towards micro-equity sites) a whole industry of third-party auditors will spring up who will be able to validate basic information about a business - such as whether the idea has plausibility issues, that the owners are who they say they are, and that the funds are being spent as stated. There are already a lot of these things in place, and I get a sense that many of the people losing money on these scams are actually not that bothered about it, and see it more as throwing a few dollars at a bunch of ideas to see what sticks. This is not necessarily unhealthy if people can handle the losses.
It is quite easy to steal small amounts of money from a large number of people. Most people will not pursue any serious legal action.
This is a limited liability company. All profits and assets will flow one way to the owners, all liability will stop with the entity that goes bankrupt. But corporations are people my friend. And the courts are ruling corporations have free speech rights, and have ruled spending money is speech, they also have free will, conscience and religious liberty, according to our courts.
It takes two real people and nine months to make a fresh citizen, and just a filing fee to create a corporate citizen. Real citizens can not dodge criminal liabilities of their actions, corporate citizens can. They are only assessed civil damages at best.
These corporations play one party against another and are going scot free. (scot was a kind of tax in old England).
Corporations are a great threat to our liberties. People who rail about and aware of the threat government power poses to our liberties are silent about the threat posed by corporate power.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The statistics I have seen suggest that 1 in 10 venture capital funded companies is a success. Venture capital investors expect a high failure rate, and build their payout to cater for it - that's why the "cost" of venture capital is so high - they need a massive payout to cover all the failures. And that's after they do all their "due diligence".
Crowd-funding involves no due diligence, so I'd expect a failure rate higher than 90%. I suspect that the only thing protecting investors is a healthy dose of skepticism :-) That, and a number of ventures that are far less ambitious than the average venture capital effort - the less ambitious projects could probably be funded by a small bank loan, because they are low risk.
The existence of scams in crowd-funding should surprise no one. Even experienced venture capitalists get scammed - witness the "water fueled car" type of schemes.
I'd strongly recommend treating any crowd-funded venture as a gamble, and I'd never invest any more than I could afford to lose on any other gamble (including lotteries, horse-racing, etc).
Sorry to hear about your problem, spiritplumber, but it was inevitable that crowd-funding would get invaded by the same scammers as venture capital - after all, they don't have to work as hard to scam the crowd-funding public. Maybe you need to talk to the real venture capitalists for your new project?
This failed because the card manufacturers are not going to allow a device that's essentially a credit card cloner!
(Also, to those saying CC chips can't be cloned, they can, all you need is an unlooper and a phoenix programmer or similar, it's not hard, the magnetic stripe only ones are even easier if those still exist anywhere, those are just three tracks containing a few hundred bits of data, usually the numbers actually embossed on the card)
The security and legal implications alone should have killed it long beffore it died.
That said I don't think there was malice on the part of the developers, I think like most projects of this type, they simply didn't understand the obstacles to what they were doing and gave it an honest try that failed.
Additionally, as I and many others have mentioned before, you are NOT buying a product when you contribute to a kickstarter or indiegogo campaign, you are making a contribution to someone else's work that /might/ get you a product if you're lucky.There are never any guarantees and if it fails, well, tough, if you can't afford to lose any money you contribute to these efforts you shouldn't get involved.
I hope now the SEC will wake up and start regulating so-called "crowdfunding" campaigns as venture capital investments, requiring equity be issued to "backers" instead of just a promise.
Backers of these projects have absolutely no recourse whatsoever, and they should. Typically, venture capital takes preferred equity in the business they're investing in, and crowdfunded projects should be no different. Really, things like kickstarter and whatever were invented solely as a means to circumvent SEC regulations.
It's time to make it stop.
Now, you're just full of shit, but go ahead and give a shred of credible evidence that the American chips can be easily cloned. I'm waiting.
Of course, I'm skipping over some technical details, but that's basically the gist of it. Also, I should mention that it's much easier to crack one card in a couple of weeks and clone it 1,000 times than having to crack 1,000 separate cards to clone them once. And also, some chipped cards are allowed to be used without the pin, because not everything on a chipped card is encrypted, and that's ok for some businesses because they'll limit the amount of the transaction when the pin is not used, and also they can take other security measures, like video recording the person, or video recording the car of the person who used it, or something else entirely. .
Not your fault as your points are sound, but I find your statements to be a bit ironic. You see, you started your post because somebody bitched about how the chip does nothing in the USA except delay the whole process. I guess you don't know because you're not like this, but the people who say stuff like "The chip does NOTHING in the USA except make the whole process take longer." are also the super paranoid people who find everything to be an invasion of their rights, so they'd also never agree to your suggestions of videotaping their cars, the transaction itself, and so on.
Are soon parted...
You need to do more research. Nearly all vendors allow for offline transactions. They merely shift the liability for failed transactions back to the merchant and provide a floor mechanism to be specified by the merchant.
If the merchant wants to accept $5 sales and is willing to take the liability (most do), no problem. If the merchant doesn't want to accept liability....also no problem (the transaction will be failed).
How many credit cards does a person need? I will answer that for you, one! Two if your job requires you to travel alot.
Use Revolut, it's great.
One Mastercard, one account, three balances - EUR, USD, GBP - currency exchange at the interbank rate with no fees. You can actually *watch* the real time exchange rate changing in the exchange page.
Ah - note it's not permitted in the USA, regulations.
You can get it when you're outside of the USA, and then keep using it once you're back inside.
USA seems totally fucked for banking. I had bank accounts there, closed them, the banks were staggering awful. I mean, OMG. I've only met one bank outside the USA which was as bad.
Because Lord knows I want to trust my financial transactions to a start up with no proven record of performance or trustworthiness, and pay for the privilege!
The summary is wrong, these were not "preorders". This is the whole problem with crowdfunding and it's the reason I think they either need to either outlaw it, or require some sort of educational barrier to entry. Require new users to go through a course and take a test at the end so they understand WTF they are actually doing with their money. Most people do not understand that Kickstater and indiegogo are not storefronts to go preorder stuff, they are sites for FUNDING a company or product. That comes with a lot of risk. Fraudulent projects aside, it's entirely possible that it will fail for legitimate reasons. Inexperience, production issues, regulatory issues (oops, looks like we need FDA approval? RIP). Before these microfunding sites came to be there were some hefty barriers to entry, both financial and regulatory, for people wanting to invest in new companies. It was assumed if you could get over those barriers you at least knew enough to know what you were getting into, even if it didn't mean you would make wise choices.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Mother fuckers. Yes, I guess I'm out $500. My mistake.
Do you think I'll make the same mistake again? Back another company as such?
Nope. Steal from me once, shame on you. There'll be no shame on me.
And honestly -- $500 is nothing to me. I've made myself a millionaire. :)
You know -- the hard way. I worked for it. Paranoid enough though that this will be anonymous.
It's the principle. Mother fuckers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu0Bm_HfX-s
The card required your phone to be nearby to work and had some extra security features. If you lost the card, the only thing the thieves would have was an expensive piece of plastic. Actually MORE secure than the original implementation.