Crowdfunding Grifters: Dimitri Albino and Harold F. Timmis |
Almost 2 years after #smARtMAKER failed to deliver to the first group of backers on Kickstarter; why are so many of the 15,000+ backer's of Indiegogo's trusted partner and fiscal agent, smARtMAKER still in shock that they have been scammed?
Reading the comments on the BE Maker page over the past few months have left me shaking my head in disbelief as the Indiegogo fraud duo targeted students, teachers and non-profits.
Recently a couple of backers posted on the BE Maker comments section about the #smARtMAKER store on AliExpress; what is interesting is no one has mentioned on the fact that the BE Maker kits that they paid for are being sold on the Chinese site for the low low price of $32.99 complete with the Arduino Basic Connections book. - About half as much as the $69 price tag was on Indiegogo.
This wasn't really surprising as Albino and Timmis pulled the same stunt on the Kickstarter backers selling the kits on the now defunct smARtMAKER.com site while failing to deliver on the 982 orders from 11/23/2012.
While Harold "Freddy" Timmis pumps as many excuses as possible into his "updates"; placing blame on everything from having a cold to having a baby; the fact still remains that "the new head of technology" for Dimitri Albino's smARtMAKER is far from the genius he was marketed as back in January of 2013.
It's funny (in a tragic sort of way) that so many backers posting in the Indiegogo comment section for the various smARtMAKER projects are so oblivious to the fact that the "China" Harold has been blaming is the same company that he is Head of Technology of.
Is Harold really looking to his mentor Albino for support now that the Florida Attorney General is knocking? If Dimitri's comments on Kickstarter are any indication, Harold "Freddy" Timmis may be out of luck.
"Harold has the full right to do anything he want during the 128 hours a week that he live out of my payroll. He can go to f*** himself, he can do drugs or he can be a volunteer teacher at the library, write books and run nonprofit (or even profit if not in competition with his job) crowdfunding campaigns. NO ONE, including you Mr. I know everything and anybody else is a dumb monkey, can say what he does is right or not.
This said, how many minutes do you think a person with knowledge and experience can take to download a design from open source repository, make some changes to improve it, and get it ready for manufacturing? Minutes for most of us. And minutes are necessary to send an order to a factory that can deal with the assembling, testing and packing. This is why he can be able to ship HIS project in few weeks and not many months."
This long con has been sad to watch; it also taught me a lot of things about crowd funding and deceptive marketing I never had cause to think about.
It is remarkably easy for dirty marketers to insinuate themselves into crowdfunding and open source forums. In an environment predicated on trust and willingness to help, it is a simple task to deceive the honest backers into doing nothing until it is too late - just use a few shills posing as "backers" to derail any efforts and keep everyone chasing their tails.
This scam was called well over a year ago...
- smARtMAKER 101
- Ethical fail for Indiegogo campaign $9 Arduino
- Final countdown… What should Indiegogo do?
- Partners in crime?
even gave Harold a chance to prove me wrong and cost me money
but hey, I'm just some guy you don't know writing on the internet.
Why trust me? A good place to start is that I'm right and not on the smARtMAKER payroll.
Kicksucker Blog
Why trust me? A good place to start is that I'm right and not on the smARtMAKER payroll.
Kicksucker Blog