@bubbles15 I see Kickstarter as yet another tool a business can use to acquire funding.

It’s our job as consumers to only donate if we feel confident that we are getting our return of investment.

The sneaky aspect is that the physical rewards make it look like we are paying for a product when we are only paying for the product to be made. You’re not guaranteed to get a (physical) reward just like investors are not guarnteed to get profit if the company fails to make money.

I know it’s beating a dead horse, but I think you should only ‘invest’ into crowdfunding projects if you’ve got money to burn.
There is no amount of disclaimers that can stop people from using it like a webshop.
That disclaimer is there every single time … and it has yet to stop me from committing.
It’s the legal equivalent to the stupid “are you sure” dialogs in an OS and it is equally useless.

There are plenty of reasons for projects to fail to deliver due to plain stupidity, getting overwhelmed by the response or bad luck. All of them depend on the creators being honest in their updates … and without direct access to the creators’ daily activities it is next to impossible to judge whether that was malicious or not.
At best it would add a ton of paperwork to the small teams that barely have time to do the minimal updates as is. And in my experience it’s been the small teams that are already overburdened by the constant requests for updates by their backers. Not everyone can afford to do this.

IMHO any additional legal requirement would ensure only big companies like GW could run crowdfunding projects.
Exactly the kind of company that don’t need crowdfunding as they likely have access to capital through traditional means.

Scammers are going to scam … as proven by the various projects reviewed by Thunderf00t on his youtube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/user/Thunderf00t

And to be honest … this is the kind of research anyone backing crowdfunding projects could do themselves.
Do we really need laws for that ? And how would that work in a global environment ?

Current consumer protection laws are highly localized … and we can’t even get the governments across the world to agree to the same standards. I doubt crowdfunding laws would be any different. So we’d run into situations where half the backers could get a refund because they happened to live in a country that has such laws.

Given how many problems international shipping already creates for teams not familliar with the needs I doubt it would solve anything.

Do you really need a bankers law act to stop you from running away with the money from investors ?
If so … you might want to check your moral compass.
It is nice that such laws exist when the proverbial excrement hits the spinning blade.
However all we are likely to get is the satisfaction the scumbag got to spend time in jail.