[lukifer]

How is it that Kickstarter has managed to stay mostly free of fraud? What's to stop someone from raising $50k with a slick video and then disappearing?

Crowd funding is a good idea, but Kickstarter has the generally right approach: small amounts, framed as donations rather than investments, and reward(s) rather than an ownership stake.

[chernevik]

I don't know anything about Kickstarter. But:

has ks been around long enough to attract / surface fraud?

incentives for fraud go up at stakes of 1 - 2mm

public investment models anticipate social disconnection bw funder and funder -- if ks depends on verification through social network linkage, that's an element potentially missing from the proposal. again, not for _you_, for the sort of people targetted by predators