Kickstarter fraudsters hawking Kobe beef jerky were just minutes away from completing the biggest-ever outright scam on the crowdfunding site last week. 
 
 A campaign titled "KOBE RED - 100% JAPANESE BEER FED KOBE BEEF JERKY" first appeared on Kickstarter on May 14, and it raised $120,000 from 3,300 backers over the past month. 
 
 That is, until Kickstarter pulled the plug just before the campaign was scheduled to end and the money was set to go into the fraudsters' bank accounts. Kickstarter relies on its community to self-police, and the Kobe Red shutdown came after sharp Kickstarter users and a documentary team raised concerns. 
 
 The supposed company in charge, Los Angeles-based Magnus Fun, promised the jerky was the first kind made from the tender and expensive Japanese Kobe beef. 
 
 Magnus Fun posted a decent amount of information on the Kobe Red page, including rave reviews from people who had supposedly tried the jerky -- "omg im licking my fingers in public," one alleged text message screenshot reads. The fraudsters also included information about imported meat inspection, and they posted a story about one of its founders eating Kobe beef on his uncle's ranch. 
 
 But Magnus Fun also raised a few eyebrows. They didn't post much personal information, nor did they include photos and videos identifying themselves (which Kickstarter recommends as best practices). And when a Kickstarter user raised concerns in the campaign's comments section, Magnus Fun didn't really try to defend itself. 
 
 Related story: Kickstarter's top projects: When they shipped 
 
 The scam concerns took off when the team from "Kickstarted," a documentary about Kickstarter, looked more deeply into the campaign. 
 
 The "Kickstarted" team highlighted problems with the Kobe Red page, including discrepancies between the high cost of production and the low pledges requested from backers. The documentarians also pointed out the comments from people swearing that they'd tried and loved the jerky all came from relatively new accounts that had backed only failed projects. 
 
 In a long post on their own site about their role in exposing the Kobe Red scam, the "Kickstarted" team says they reached out to Magnus Fun with an interview request for the film, and Magnus Fun went back and forth for a bit before promising instead to send footage from a recent taste test in California. 
 
 "Kickstarted" said it uncovered "dozens of other smaller inconsistencies and fishy elements" that were enough for Kickstarter to shut the campaign down. 
 
 Magnus Fun has since deleted its Kickstarter account, and Kickstarter itself declined to comment on this story. 
 
 "It's a credit to Kickstarter and the collective power of the crowd to identify fraud," the "Kickstarted" team, which also posted on Reddit about its concerns, wrote in its blog post. 
 
 But it's also a sobering reminder that even feel-good programs like Kickstarter come with serious risks, even beyond straight-up frauds like this one. Last year, a CNNMoney investigation found that 84% of Kickstarter projects don't ship on time. In other cases, products have failed to materialize after creators promised more than they could deliver. 
 
 Kickstarter projects have raised $571 million to date, and as with any major platform for raising money, scammers will try to bilk well-meaning backers out of serious cash. In the case of Kobe Red, they very nearly got away with it. ||||| “Glory to Rome” wasn’t shipped in a day. 
 
 Ed Carter only asked for $21,000 on crowdfunding site Kickstarter to produce a deluxe version of “Glory to Rome,” one of several board games made by his company, Cambridge Games Factory. But there were far more board game enthusiasts willing to put money into his project than Carter expected. At the end of a 21-day funding period in the summer of 2011, more than 1,600 people had pledged $73,102. That should have made fulfilling the orders easy. Instead, that was when Carter’s nightmare started. 
 
 Carter’s company makes cheaply-produced strategy board games. For Carter, who works as an independent consultant, it’s a hobby. The Kickstarter campaign was meant to take it up a notch with a lavishly produced game. In addition, Carter offered the project’s backers (i.e., customers) free shipping on their games if they agreed to collect them from a nearby game store; that way he hoped to build relationships with the stores and avoid paying distributors to sell future games. His background as a retail consultant who had worked in China was meant to be an asset. But what that meant was that Carter was, in his own words, “too clever by half.” 
 
 Carter cut out middlemen and went directly to a Chinese producer. But soon after he made the link, his Chinese-speaking head of operations quit over disagreements about free shipping and his relationship with a Chinese girl fell apart, leaving him with nobody who could speak Chinese. Small mistakes compounded his woes: it hadn’t occurred to Carter to add “no step” to the shipping documentation, which would have told handlers not to put anything heavy on top of the fragile game boxes. Stacking one pallet on top of another crushed them. Free shipping eventually came back to haunt him: Large orders to countries like the US were fine, as were a couple of boxes to Brazil, but sending 100 games to Australia meant fat expenses but not enough to benefit from economies of scale. 
 
 Carter’s work suffered. The company he contracted at, Staples, was making cuts and Carter found himself without a job. His savings were being ploughed into the game, which he says eventually cost him between $100,000 and $120,000. Running out of cash and faced with expenses from every avenue, Carter stopped making the mortgage on a house he owned outside Boston, which was also his company address. He eventually lost the house. (Carter, who lives in Amsterdam, admits that had he lived in the Boston house, he might not have sacrificed it for the game.) 
 
 Meanwhile, Carter’s Kickstarter backers were getting anxious. Nearly a year after the campaign closed, they still hadn’t seen their games. An entire US state was “forgotten” when shipping did start. By March, Carter was facing tremendous pressure on his Kickstarter updates page. In response to a post about losing his house, one commenter wrote: 
 
 I’m sorry, but fuck off with your guilt trip at the beginning of your update. As someone who has sat quite [sic], my only crime is donating money to help get this project off the ground. I see no reason why you should be blaming us for your downfall. Most of this update was unnecessary and I’m done with this company. 
 
 All that for a board game. Still, Carter says he might consider doing it again. “I’m doing this because the corporate world is one of the best games ever invented.” says Carter, who has shipped most of the units and now has a new job. “In the middle of the hell, there were plenty of times when I wished I hadn’t kicked it off. But given where it’s landed, I learnt stuff. And the game itself is beautiful.” ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
– They were almost taken for fools. But one almost-unlucky group of Kickstarter users managed to uncover a $120,309 scam on the site, helping to kill the campaign less than an hour before it was set to end—and their money was whisked out of their bank accounts. CNNMoney reports on what sounded intriguing to 3,252 backers: a campaign called "KOBE RED - 100% JAPANESE BEER FED KOBE BEEF JERKY." It went live May 14 and was set to close June 13, and the page looked official enough: complete with a 1:29 video, "rave reviews" from fans who had supposedly tried it at the SXSW festival, and a personal (albeit horrifically spelled) note from the maker. (Sample: It was my uncle who taught me how to make those juicy strips and chuncks of "The Ranchers Keep" into beef jerky and I've been making great jerky ever sense.) But something seemed fishy: For one, there were no photos of the people behind the company, Los Angeles-based Magnus Fun; commenters pointed out that the super-fatty beef isn't suited to making jerky. And then the Kickstarted documentary team started digging around, after it reached out to the company in hopes of interviewing it for its film ("their product sounded delicious," the filmmakers wrote). After exchanging a few emails with the project creators, it became suspicious, too, and uncovered "indicators of fraud" (read them here). Kickstarter suspended the campaign at the 11th hour, but had no comment for CNNMoney. In other depressing Kickstarter news, Quartz has the story of a man whose Kickstarter was super successful ... but ended up costing him his house.