How the Kickstarter battery-free toothbrush faked a demo - General

They removed the original video shortly after this was posted, same with the about us section on their website https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EfheHKaRF10 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/goodwell/be-the-first-battery-free-powered-toothbrush

Wow, so doing a little math on their Kickstarter page: 3,099 backers for the $49 pledge + 190 backers for the $89 pledge + 1,965 backers for the $96 pledge. $151,851 + $16,910 + $188,640 That's $357,401 of potentially angry chargebacks. I can't believe Kickstarter keeps letting people get away with this AND that people keep falling for it.

Wouldn't this make the company running the kickstarter legally liable for fraud if anyone bothered to sue?

Knowing the average Kickstarter user, the most they'll get is a badly spelled comment asking where their "purchase" went and vague threats that their uncles father who works at Nintendo will ban them from Fortnite. Kickstarter themselves likely do take action against repeated scam artists, but projects that just straight up fail to deliver and end up faking content to try and calm backers rarely get dealt with properly last I checked.

They posted a backer update yesterday, wish I could see the comments https://i.imgur.com/jZFBqwn.png

It's been getting so expensive to live in San Francisco that inhabitants have resorted to making kickstarters for fake products to afford rent.

Shaking my head at this lazy editing. think of all the money they could have grifted

aaand their instagram's gone. The fake news must be really getting to them https://www.instagram.com/thegoodwellcompany/

Something I noticed, you more than likely have to buy their refills typically, 3 Electric brush heads for ~16$ ugh 2 manuals for ~6.99 eh.. 10 ct cheap manuals for 6.99 yea! - all amazon prices btw. Whatever case it's a constant subscription model so yeah they can fuck a hat, just a ~good conscience~ product. Waiting for someone to solve brush heads from fraying after 1-3 months of use and still be relatively antibacterial. Doubling lifespan or more would be great. That's where the money is.

Yeah lol, if you're going to fake a video making a mistake like the repeating leaf movements just seems like amateur hour. What were they thinking?

Looks like the Goodwell of their customers is about to disappear...

This is really disappointing, I actually wanted a battery-free sustainable toothbrush Wherever can I possibly get such space-age technology now?

People who get sucked in on shit on kickstarter are dumb af, and plenty of dumb sellers thinking to make a quick buck off kickstarter. Like I keep getting ads on fb of kickstarter products that are just minor upgrades of already existing products trying to sell to kids our age for a huge muck up

They posted an update video, and it doesn't look faked this time. tl;dr: their last prototype was broken and rather than wait for a working one, decided to completely ruin their image and backers' trust by making a fake video https://ksr-video.imgix.net/assets/021/959/719/01a33f063ca5f6da4e5f5c33964e1602_h264_high.mp4 In full transparency, we had a piece break on the prototype on the last day we were traveling, and we felt the pressure to make it work. No excuse. In retrospect, we should have never published the video, and apologize from the depths of our hearts. We never meant it to mislead - rather to encourage that we are on our way to delivering something great.

Liars.

God its so fucking ugly lol

unless they changed their TOS, you're not allowed to sue kickstarter or a kickstarter partner/project/whatever if you donate money to them. This may have changed between the last round of fraudulent kickstarter campaigns.

He doesn't look happy lol

Got to make sure to rape everyone's ears while he's at it.

Not necessarily. Could have panicked and made a bad decision. It happens.

It could be argued that by committing fraud the contract was not made in good faith and therefore is invalid.

Good thing that in most places ToS can't actually forbid you things like "not being able to sue". They can write it but in court it will hold very little. Also a funny thing about this video, 15s seems realistic but there is one thing the guy has failed to mention. This is 15s without any additional load, this thing would go to a crawling halt in 2-3 seconds. Pretty sure people know what Im talking about from when their electric one goes low, at a point the resistance is too big and it stops.