Indiegogo Will Now Use Collection Agencies?

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What's the best way to "build your trust?" If you are Indiegogo, you change your TOS to let everyone know you will use third-party collections agencies to recover funds if the you don't fulfill your obligations to backers. :eek:

That being said, we will not tolerate abuse of our platform. If an entrepreneur breaches our Terms of Use or doesn’t fulfill their obligations to backers, we will take appropriate action against the campaign. We will do everything in our power to recover funds for our backers, including contacting third-party collections agencies. In some cases, if the situation is not egregious, we will reach out to the campaign owners to try to work with them before taking definitive action. Overall, we pledge to do what is fair.
 
Translation:

We have determined we can make more money by using our terms of service to create delinquent accounts that we can sell off to creditors at pennies on the dollar, so we will be doing that.

It's not really fixing the problem as it's not really going to help the backers, but hey. Maybe the increased risk will keep a couple idiots away. Doubt it though.
 
When a company now days say they are changing things to make it "better for our customers and build your trust" my first thought is that old joke about "we're from the government and we're here to help."

Sure.......
 
Collection agencies tend to be terrible but if they can be turned to punishing people who all too often are using crowd-funding as a scam, that's perfectly fine with me even if few of the victims ever see their money again.
 
So they are trying to drive away possible backers? I'm curious to see how this turns out :D

edit: totally misread this. This is actually kind of intriguing. Maybe they should partner with the mob.
 
why the hell should investors be entitled to a refund? Thats the risk you take when you invest in something. The real problem here is that people today are using crowdfunding to pre-order things. Some company designs a neat electronic device and some schmuck thinks he's buying it for $50 in advance. The reality is that he is investing $50 so that the thing can be developed. Sometimes that investment isnt enough. What really needs to happen is that he invests that $50 and then gets a piece of the company in return for his investment. Then if the company can afford to deliver free products to their investors great, if not then you go buy one as an investor anyway. Your investment will eventually pay for the device.
 
I'm not sure you guys are understanding this correctly... They're saying they will go after the people running campaigns that then fail to deliver after taking everyone's money (like pebble just did)!
 
Honestly, with the couple of projects I got screwed on with Kickstarter (eg: ZNAPS), I think this is the route to go.
 
This is stupid on many levels. Mainly all startups should be properly incorporated to protect the individual employees' and founders' assets in case of a bankruptcy. Good luck collecting from a defunct corporation that has been dissolved.

Also, this is venture capital for the poor man. Expect a total loss.

This will; however, weed out the idiot start-ups that don't incorporate and are just fly-by-night. Even if it doesn't have teeth, it will scare the dumb people.

IF you don't incorporate, and made your best effort to deliver, but couldn't; there needs to be a lawsuit and a determination of the start-up made a good faith effort to deliver. I don't really know what a collection agency can do.
 
Indiegogo seems to be the place of the shadiest crowd funding projects. Utter bull like Airing and Batterizer, and outright scams like that artificial gill thing. Plus Indiegogo has an option where the campaigner can just quit and take whatever they got so far if they don't reach their goal. So on one hand, they really do need to step up their game with the scammers and total frauds. But then also, people need to do a little research before just dumping money in things on emotion. Lottery is a tax on the stupid, so is some of this crowdfunding. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and a little searching will turn up plenty of debunking sites on the really BS campaigns. Of course, sometimes the campaigners (or their surrogates) retaliate, such as a blast of thumbs down for the YouTube videos created by a person who did a very through debunking of the product. Said rash of thumbs downs came from a country that the Youtuber doesn't even have many subscribers from.
 
So will they go after companies that fail or things didn't work out and they close up shop? This happens often when you bite off more than you can afford to chew. Or are they just going after ones that scam users? Damn this entitlement crap. I have given money to a few programs in the past, one fell apart, i just shrugged it off. I mean $50 sucks but I knew going in that I was donating money to help a project I wanted to see grow, I was not buying stock in a company.
 
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