jgsugden
Legend
YOur life would not change if you had 5 times your annual salary dropped into your lap out of nowhere?I can't speak for other people, but life changing money for me (if I do the numbers) is around $2,000,000 and that is a lot more than 5x my salary!
That money has to be spent on fufiling the KS though. A $250K Kickstarter isn't $250K in the creator's pocket to buy a car or a house, it's $50K of books they have to provide (and there are stories of KS with big 'funding' figures which ended up in the red, making nothing at all).
It's important to remember that the KS funding total is just gross revenue. Actual profit can be a very tiny fraction of that.
And, beyond fraud, in total mismanagement scenarios you can see people do some prework before the KS, then get the money, then mismanage it while struggling to respond to feedback gathered in the KS (especially where they got carried away and overpromised during the KS on requests), they can end up spending the money unwisely - including for things like buying tools to do things for the KS that are also highly fun for the KS organizer - computers, 3D printers, workshops, etc...Well, we are speaking in the context of fraud, in which the person running the kickstarter has no intention of actually completing the project.
I believe most utter failures in the KS world are born of incompetence more than fraud - but they tend to look a lot like fraud from the perspective of the backer who gets nothing in the end.