Legal Geek No. 132: A Kickstarter Scam for the Ages in Tabletop Games

Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we cover a scam in the Tabletop game space that has recently come to light, as a lesson in why we all still need to be careful with Kickstarter and other funding websites.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp132 

Kickstarter has been a force in the tabletop board game development space for years, as many developers and publishers use the service as a pre-order system to fund first print runs of new games.  When dealing with funding concepts like Kickstarter, there's always a chance for fraud however.

Boarders Tabletop Game Studio served as a primary distributor for the southeastern Asia market when it came to several popular Tabletop game Kickstarter projects, including Anachrony and Gloomhaven.  The company also came up with a service where backers from this region would group together to save on shipping, which can otherwise be very cost prohibitive for individual backers far away from most tabletop game companies based in Europe and the U.S.

But these customers started to see warning signs a few months ago when shipping information began to be inconsistent with Boarder's deliveries, and the company became unresponsive to e-mails and chat requests.  The suspect activity came to a head when one game designer who worked with Boarders to distribute in southeast Asia announced on their Kickstarter page that Boarders had received the shipment of the backer's games but had stopped all contact and had absconded with the product and the down payment for fulfillment.  That was allegedly a $20,000 heist of sorts.

This led to further investigation by some companies and project backers, and it was discovered that Boarders had collected backer funds for many other projects without actually pledging to purchase the product.  That's the definition of fraud, taking money under a pretense that is completely false.  

Project backers in these countries have started to band together to make police reports and help local reporters investigate this situation.  Outside one Facebook update in late March indicating the board game café the company runs was closing permanently, there has been no communication from Boarders.  There appears to be at least 10 companies where Boarders did not pay them for games sent to Boarders as a distributor, and over $35,000 of product not delivered to consumers. 

While several isolated incidents have occurred over the years on single Kickstarter projects where the creators did not deliver product and absconded with the funds, this collection of activities is quickly becoming the biggest case of fraud ever reported in the tabletop game industry.  Unless facts begin to change in a hurry, these project backers and companies appear to be out of luck.  That's just sad, in an industry made for the purposes of having fun and making people happy.

The Bottom Line is, there's always some risk when crowdfunding or investing in a potential game or product.  When adding a third party intermediary like Boarders to the mix, that's simply another risk factor that has to be considered.   It will be interesting to see if game companies and Kickstarter itself puts in some more protections to try and avoid such fraudulent activity from occurring in the future.  But for now, keep safe with your investments, friends.

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