KickstarterForum.org

Hey, all. I'm Alex, and some posts that I made on Thursday (November 7th) resulted in this getting some press.

Farhan pledged $1000 to my campaign, which ended August 20th, and I got the charge dispute email on October 11th, a few days after I'd posted about starting to ship my physical rewards. I submitted my evidence to appeal the decision, and was just waiting for the outcome when Alex and Tim from Anarchy Enterprises got in touch with me. When I got their email with the long list of people talking about this guy and how much money he's gotten out of us, it blew my mind, because I've been going crazy the last few weeks while this has been going on.

I forwarded all my correspondence to Kickstarter about this issue, then I ranted on Twitter and Tumblr, just hoping to get the word out about this, and it seems to have worked. Or at least, some steps are being taken towards getting a happy outcome for everybody.

I got burned as well. $850 from Encik Farhan and curiously another one named Amhad Jatt just around the same time for $900. I've disputed both to Amazon, I have not heard back from them. My concern is that they give me a cursory brush off and I'm out $1750. What further steps should I be taking here to ensure I have their sufficient attention on this matter?

So as much as I can be ticked at this individual (I am assuming both here are the same scam) I am trying to wrap my head around the operation here. Why would they hit KS pledges instead of normal e-commerce sites? Doesn't make much sense.

Ah well. :-/

Hey guys, we were one of the first to make a complaint about all this and i'm so glad it is going viral now and something is going to be done about it...we will not pay back the $$ because this is not our fault. by the way Encik Farhan has a Face Book page. It says he lives in Kuching, Malaysia and works at Kementerian Pelajaran Malaysia. He has a lot of friends! the whole thing is so strange.....[color=#804000][/color]

Farhan is a pretty common Malay name, and Encik is just the Malay equivalent of "Mister," so it's going to be more difficult to actually pin this guy down than doing a cursory Facebook search. Just putting that out there, I don't want to call down the hounds on some random Farhan out there just because he happens to share the name of our guy.

The shipping address I was given was in the city of Johor Bahru, so if that's the same as everyone else, then there's the place to start a search. But for all we know, this guy might not even be named Farhan at all.

I contacted him personally over Skype. Apparently he also goes by the name of "John Botak." His Skype location was Mumbai, India. Even if our problem in terms of funds gets fixed, we'll still have an "anonymous" scammer on the loose.

Hi,

Thank you to whomever for starting this forum. Other users have expressed correctly that we're going to need to fight this as a group or else Amazon will be sure to try to make the Kickstarter users responsible for the loss of monies.

I've been trying to get answers from Amazon Payments for a week now, but to no avail. I could be the one most effected by this fake user, "Encik Farhan". The individual donated $5,000 to our non-profit arts organization's project. We can in no way reimburse this money--nor do I think we should be expected to. I'm hoping that Amazon Payments will take the hit on this, as it seems unlikely any of the Kickstarter users will be able to refund the money.

Does this person see him/herself as a modern day Robin Hood--stealing accounts from the rich and donating money to the "poor" Kickstarter users? If you've gone through the trouble of stealing amazon payment accounts or credit card numbers, there's not much money in getting some random Kickstarter rewards mailed to you. Perhaps there is an element of this that I'm missing, and in fact this character is working a money-making scheme?

A question for everybody, did he ever ask for any favors? I remember him asking me(after the $1100 that he pledged hit my bank) for an iPhone 5. He said, "You don't have to send me the reward. Can I instead ask for a favor?" "It is very hard for me in my country to get iPhone 5. Can you buy that for me with the money?"

That right there just raised a red flag.

This Encik Farhan pledged $5,000 and the transaction came through under the name Charles M. Silver. So far they have not disputed the transaction. Earlier in the campaign he shared his contact details:

email : akusukaiphone@gmail.com
contact number : +601121707655

I wonder if he used a stolen credit card number as well, given the variety of names given for the transactions!

There is the possible chance that this could be an inside job...

Yeah, the name on the credit card he used for me was Murray A. Long. My first hunch when this initially came up was that he was using a stolen card, and now it appears to be a combination of credit card fraud and being a total asshole.