I have an idea. You can pay me to place some Kobe Beef Jerky in strategic moments throughout the movie. I have consulted with both stakeholders and they will agree to this. It will be like Wayne's World 2! Zang :)
Obviously Kickstarter have access to more information than anyone outside the company so it's probably the case that this is fraud (comparing IP addresses and Amazon account details on backers etc) however looking through the comments on the Kickstarter there does appear to be some genuine comments.
For example there are two comments from before the project blew up from "B.B." and "tomicakes" both claiming to have tried the Jerky at one of the taste sessions these guys held, the "B.B" user registered in April 2013 and has created and backed other projects, "tomicakes" also backed another project and commented on it quite a few times.
If this is a case of fraud they went all out on it... the accounts using to shill pre-date the kickstarter. With this in mind it looks like it's possible that the problem was not the jerky did not exist but maybe they weren't using actual Kobe Beef? Maybe the fraud was the product itself, not the existence of the product?
B.B[1] posted a comment on May 18 saying, "i had kobe red jerky yesterday at the GREAT GOOGAMOOGA MUSIC AND FOOD FESTIVAL in brooklyn NYC and it was amazing!"
B.B has an account on Kickstarter registered in April 2013. The account has backed 6 projects and created 1. The project created was a "gay handbook for straight friends" (B.B identifies as a gay woman) created on April 17 that had 18 backers for a total of $501, the goal was $1700 and was not met.
Tomicakes[2] was created in May 2013, the account backed the KRJ project and another called "Natural Decadence: Gluten-free Grahams.". The account posted multiple comments on KRJ claiming to have tasted it at an event (and goes on to interact with B.B in the comments), tomicakes also commented on the "Natural Decadence: Gluten-free Grahams." project a couple of times.
There's more comments from people claiming to have tasted it with account histories. This is either people seriously committed to fraud (I guess it's possible when it's hundreds of thousands on the line... but the target was only 2k) or the fraud is the product quality. I feel that backing a wide variety of different projects and creating different projects across a wide variety of accounts is the point where this becomes more likely a misunderstanding vs. premeditated fraud.
The ways in which the project came out as a fraud are so very amateur that if this is a pre-meditated fraud (in that someone created fake projects, backed projects, created plausible accounts months in advance) I can't see how they managed to screw up so royally when it comes to whois and usernames?
edit: oh I see what you mean about the first project, impossible to find out as the account has been removed and there's no google cache. If the project previously matches the current MO (30 day) then yes, it may well match up!
Unfortunately if they follow up and read through various descriptions of their activities they will know what they did wrong and take steps to correct it making the next fraud all that harder to detect.
Well what to you know, mere minutes before I saw this submission on HN I received an email from Kickstarter saying that funding for the project has been suspended. I feel like an idiot for backing the project, but I guess it comes to show that even careful curation on Kickstarter's part isn't always foolproof.
Does anyone know if other crowdsourcing sites with less stringent requirements (e.g., Indiegogo) have problems with scam like this?
True, but if I saw a bag of 7 oz. Kobe jerky in the store for 7$, I would a) question the legitimacy of it and b) buy it anyway just to see what jerky with that much fat actually tastes like. Just because something sounds like a bad idea doesn't mean it isn't worth trying just to see what happens.
Yeah, this project was apparently reported to Kickstarter weeks ago by multiple people and they didn't give a fuck until it blew up into a huge PR shitstorm after the makers of Kickstarted found out about it. I mean, the company doesn't exist, their photos are stolen, their tastings provably didn't happen, the product probably isn't even possible let alone feasable at that price...
I don't think that's the case. Their documentary is on crowdfunders, not scams. The unraveled the scam because of the documentary and being mentioned by Kobe Red (though the publicity certainly is helping)
It's like someone just mechanically threw together a bunch of random concepts and terms they gathered through a quick google, without much effort make it seem plausible. They don't even seem to have tried to be subtle about it... ><
That looks like 肉干 (rou4 gan1, or bak kua in hokkien).
It's usually made of pork. I've tried those made of chicken and beef ones. They taste yucky. Stick with the pork ones. I'm guessing in trying to capture the majority muslim market in Malaysia, they came up with the beef version.
Anything involving Kobe beef in the US has a very high chance of being a scam, since it is not a protected term. Real kobe beef is extremely hard to get even in Japan.
Kobe beef wasn't exported prior to 2012, and today, the US has only received <400kg of it. Not much at all. It's almost certainly not Kobe beef if it's named as such - and certainly not if it's affordable.
Hmm. In 1999/2000 I had a $110 Kobe Beef cheeseburger (complete with truffles) at the Burger Bar in Vegas, so either (A) it wasn't Kobe Beef or (B) there was some limited exporting prior to 2012.
It wasn't, sorry. There are farms in the US that try to mimic the process, and there've been cattle flown in from Japan, which might have been what you had (but who knows, the real product isn't trademarked here).
Kobe beef is also around $300-400 for 1kg, so maybe $50-100 in ingredients alone, in Japan, for a burger, let alone what it costs when imported.
Not that it matters a great deal. You probably still got something good. There's other highly (and higher) valued beef in Japan too, Kobe is just a big prestigious brand.
Apparently, "Kobe" is used to describe many things, and, given that a prominent place like the burger bar is still selling their burgers 10 years later, their doesn't appear to be a lot of trademark police chasing people down.
"Kobe beef" is trademarked in Japan and is legally protected there, but not in the US, where anyone is free to use it as they like. You can still prove a beef cut has come from the real source via certification.
These things usually get codified in trade agreements. It seems that Japan hasn't been particularly concerned about protecting Kobe beef internationally, likely because there are so few exports simply due to production limits.
Various factors, some of which have been touched upon below:
1. There is almost 0 chance that you've tasted beef from a wagyu cow from the city of Kobe. Aside from import/export costs, the cost in Japan (having actually eaten Kobe beef from Kobe) is far closer to about $400-600 per steak (2kg perhaps?)
It's easy to get in the US, it just costs a lot. There are restaurants in NYC that have the certified product, expect your meal to run you around a grand.
I wager that most reading this in the US have $1000 sitting their bank account or in savings right now, and of the ones that don't most could somehow borrow or scrape together $1000 in less than 4-6 weeks if they really had to. So as such getting hold of $1000 is 'easy' for most people.
The average American family that even has a savings account has around $6,000 in it, total (http://finance.zacks.com/much-money-average-american-family-...). You can see how spending 1/6 of your total savings on a single meal would strike most people as out of reach.
Not to mention that ~30% of families have no savings at all.
I think we're talking past each other. I agree that spending $1000 on a single meal is impractical, wasteful and a bad idea for a whole host of reasons for the vast majority of people, but it isn't difficult to do from a purely implementation point of view. However just because something is easy to do, doesn't mean it is a good idea, and I think this qualifies as such a thing.
Are you defining 'real' as 'cattle breed X raised in method Y at location Z'? Because location shouldn't matter; I couldn't care less what the 'Kobe Beef Marketing and Distribution Promotion Association' thinks.
What do you think Kobe means? It specifically refers to a region of Japan. The breed of cattle is actually called "Wagu." If you want "kobe beef" that's fed and raised in a different manner, you can get Wagu and not pay the exorbitant prices.
'Kobe' is actually a city in that region of Japan, so the name already doesn't match the geographical location. Even pedantic-marketing Kobe beef doesn't ever have to visit Kobe.
Wait a sec, that sounds like Japanese innovation! (I guess my point is that the reverse could happen anywhere... and I wouldn't mind tasting Kobe jerky if given the chance.)
So, if I posted a kickstarter project to launch a social, cloud-based app that allowed you to organize photos along with dooing big data about kobe beef mashups, I'd get traction?
Biggest as in "most boldly false from the start" or as in "dollar amount raised but didn't deliver"? If the latter, I think the secure USB key project was over $200K. Granted, I think the USB key folks started out hoping to make good.
Starting it out with the best intentions and failing to deliver due to naivety or unforeseen circumstances isn't in any way fraud. In fact I'd argue that that should be a perfectly acceptable and expected end for a significant percentage of kickstarter projects.
Biggest as in most spectacular, I expect. ZionEyez raised much more money but I don't think they had quite the level of shilling and aggesssiveness that this Kickstarter did. For instance, from the comments section:
> Might not be related but a Mike Walden just posted on my business's facebook calling me a child predator.(I've never gotten so much as a misdemeanor).
> And this is the funniest part, just a curious thing I found. The Facebook page for Kobe Red Jerky is:
https://www.facebook.com/louis.friend.948
.
> "Louis Friend" is an anagram for "Iron Sulfide", or more commonly known as "Fool's Gold". Funny, isn't it?!
> i'm already working on old mans ip address and info, give me 30 minutes and you will be able to give the police his home address.
Also some really spectacular trolling of the comments section in order to make it hard to find critical comments, including someone puporting to be a PETA supporter.
Seriously. They have a neat project, but this is one of those cases where they need to seriously seek out constructive criticism because that is just terrible. The narrator is trying to sound almost carnivalesque but the result is a slurred monotone of barely decipherable words.
Translation: we uncovered one of many scams in the history of a platform for collecting money that does zero verification of anything and that exists for a couple years. Which even come forward to back a project that goes against all their rules, but generated revenue.
It likely happens a lot but goes undetected, or doesn't make the news. Modest success would be less likely to get people investigating than overshooting the goal.
I think this project got the spotlight because of the large amount of money pledged, and the large difference between "money asked for" and "money pledged".
I think it's still possible to fraud people over kickstarter by staying under the radar: ask for little money, and if you receive not much (let's say under 5000? 1000?), no-one will bother to investigate whether your project worked out.
I would chalk it to the fact that if you have a really good idea for a new original product, one that is good enough and realistic enough that it would convince people to part with their money, you might as well try and make it a reality.
What happened in this case is that was a product that too few of the mostly technical-oriented Kickstarter audience understood was unrealistic.
Now there's a meta-fraud for you.