Kickstarter Scam Emails: The Ones Creators Actually Get

At three in the morning an email landed from a fellow creator. Warm, complimentary, said he’d just seen the project and loved the concept. Mentioned the well-known retro computing product he was behind, which is a genuinely famous one. Asked, since I was the mastermind here, whether he could hear more about the project.

It was a scam, and a fairly good one. I’ve had the same email before, from a different name.

Kickstarter scam emails target creators rather than backers, and the impersonation version is the most common thing landing in my inbox at the moment. Someone borrows the identity of a creator who has actually succeeded, contacts you while your campaign is live or launching soon, gets you talking, and then offers to put your project in front of their backer list for a modest fee. As an official Kickstarter Expert Partner I see these constantly, and so does every founder I work with.

How the impersonation one works

The mechanics are always the same, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.

They pick a creator with a well-known funded project. That person’s name, photograph and biography are sitting on a public campaign page, free to copy. Then they register a free Gmail address using some arrangement of the real person’s name. Not a lookalike domain, usually. Just firstnamemiddlenamelastname@gmail.com, which reads as plausible at a glance.

The first email asks for nothing. That’s the part that works. It’s flattery plus a question, designed only to get a reply, because a conversation is much harder to walk away from than a cold pitch. Answer it and you’re two emails deep with someone you now half-believe is a real person.

The offer arrives next. They have a list of backers from their own campaign, or a newsletter of crowdfunding enthusiasts, and they’d be happy to feature you. The price is small: usually somewhere between one and three hundred, in whatever currency they’ve picked. Small enough to feel like a sensible punt rather than a decision.

There is no list. You pay, and either nothing happens or you get a screenshot of a “send” that went nowhere.

This isn’t a one-off. One well-known comics creator has publicly documented scammers doing exactly this with variations of his name, targeting just-launched and launching-soon campaigns, all funnelling towards a promotion package of a few hundred dollars. Kickstarter itself publishes guidance on spotting impersonation and off-platform spam, which tells you how routine it has become.

The tells, in the order you’ll notice them

The address is free. A creator who raised half a million pounds has a domain. If the email comes from Gmail, Outlook or Proton and claims a company behind it, that’s your answer before you read a word.

It’s unsolicited and it’s flattering. Real creators are busy shipping. They are not trawling launching-soon pages to compliment strangers.

They can’t prove the list. Ask for the newsletter archive, the subscriber count from the platform, an open rate, the last three campaigns they featured and who to contact at those campaigns. A real promoter has this to hand and sends it happily. A scammer produces vagueness or a screenshot.

The fee is small and up front. Deliberately. It’s priced below the threshold where you’d do proper diligence, and low enough that most people write it off rather than chase it.

There’s a clock on it. Your launch is in nine days and the newsletter goes out Thursday. Urgency is the standard tool for stopping people checking.

The English is slightly off. Not always, and don’t rely on it alone, but copied bios stitched into a new message often read strangely.

It nearly worked on me

I should be honest about this, because a post that says “here are the tells, obviously you’d spot them” is worth nothing.

One of these ran at me for twelve days across seven emails, and I answered every one of them. Here is the whole thing, because the shape is the useful part.

Day one. An email from a creator behind a genuinely famous travel-gear campaign, one that raised serious money and that I’d actually heard of. Free Gmail address. “I just came across your upcoming campaign… As a fellow creator, I know how much work goes into crafting a solid launch.” He wanted to grab a big reward package but the campaign was still coming-soon, so he asked when I was launching. Signature block with the brand’s logo and a link to their real Kickstarter profile.

Day two. He’d read my reply properly, quoted my ocean-plastic line back at me, and asked a sensible question about my launch window. No ask.

Day five. Now positioning: “As a successful creator what works best for me is building a community of reliable backers even before launching.” Three numbered things campaigns need to survive, one of which was Projects We Love. Then a question about whether I’d built a community. Still no ask.

Day seven. The pivot, and it’s beautifully done. “My community comprises of backers about twelve thousand 12,000 in numbers… and is also handled by a specialist who have been responsible for the organization and distribution of vital updates to this community.” He does a distribution on Fridays. He could include my campaign. Would I like to connect with this specialist?

Day seven, later. The handoff. “You can contact the specialist - Amos via…” another Gmail.

Day eight. Amos writes. “Yes, Ken informed me that I will be helping you with newsletters to his backers/community resources. We have been able to build and maintain more than 12,000 community subscribers.” How many emails would I like reached?

Day twelve. The price, and the line I still admire: “Please note that Ken Hertz email list is freely available to you. These packages are designed to cover the cost of subscribing to a premium platform.”

Essential package: 2,500 backer emails. $150. Recommended: 6,000. $250.

Why the two-hander works

Look at what that structure does.

The creator never asks you for money. Not once in five emails. He stays warm, generous and credible right to the end, and the ask comes from a third party he “introduced” you to. So when the price appears, you’ve already spent a week deciding the creator is real, and the specialist inherits that trust without ever having earned it.

There’s a second thing the handoff solves, and it took me a while to see it. They can never get on a video call with you as the creator. Their face is not that person’s face, and that person’s face is on a campaign video with a few hundred thousand views. A call ends the whole thing in four seconds.

So the structure has to keep everything in text, and “let me introduce you to my specialist” is a perfectly natural reason why you’ll never speak to the creator again. You get handed to someone whose identity is invented rather than stolen, so he can take a call quite safely. By then the credibility has already transferred.

Which hands you the single best test in this whole article, and it costs nothing. Ask for a two-minute video call. A real creator who genuinely wants to help will say yes, or say they’re busy and suggest a time, because talking to people is the entire premise of what they’ve offered. An impersonator will not get on that call, ever. They’ll be enthusiastic, they’ll be apologetic, they’ll offer you a longer email instead, and they will never once appear on camera.

Then the framing on the fee. The list is free, you understand. You’re only covering a platform subscription. That sentence exists so that paying doesn’t feel like buying, and it neatly explains why a successful creator would be charging you at all.

And the reason it nearly worked on me isn’t that I’m careless. It’s that creators genuinely do help other creators. It’s one of the better parts of this industry. People who have launched will take a call, share what went wrong, introduce you to their ad agency, put you in front of their backers because someone once did it for them. I’ve done it and people have done it for me. So an email from a successful creator offering a hand is not implausible. It’s a Tuesday.

The scam isn’t renting a stranger’s name. It’s renting a real social norm.

What broke it was the number. When $150 appeared, something didn’t sit right, and it’s worth naming why: creators who genuinely want to help don’t invoice you in week two. They offer the intro, the call, the share. Ten minutes of research later, the person emailing me was not the owner of the brand he claimed to run.

So the rule I’d give you is narrower than “be suspicious of friendly emails”, because that rule would have cost me real relationships. It’s this: be suspicious at the exact moment money enters a conversation that started as generosity. Everything before that can be perfectly normal, because it is designed to be. The price is the seam.

Four things I’ve actually caught in my own inbox

None of these are hypothetical. All four are sitting in my mail right now, and each one is a test you can run in about thirty seconds.

“As a fellow creator.” The three-in-the-morning email I opened with used that exact phrase. So did one from thirteen months earlier, different name, different Gmail, same three words, same flattery, same interest in my upcoming campaign. When the same sentence arrives from two unconnected strangers a year apart, you’re reading a script rather than a message.

The same email from two different people. I have two messages, from two separate senders on two separate addresses, sent within a month of each other, that are word-for-word identical. Same subject line, same paragraphs, same offer. Neither of them wrote it. They bought or copied it, which tells you how much personal attention your campaign is really getting.

An unfilled merge field. One arrived opening with “Hello [First Name]”. The template didn’t populate, and the sender hadn’t read their own email before firing it at a few hundred creators. If they can’t be bothered to check that, they aren’t about to promote you carefully.

Audience numbers that move. My favourite. One sender told me their newsletter reached 250,000 people. In the very next email, once I asked a direct question, the same newsletter reached 90,000. Nobody loses 160,000 subscribers between Tuesday and Thursday. Ask for the number twice, a few days apart, and see whether it holds.

The other four you’ll meet

Impersonating creators is only the most personal one.

Fake Kickstarter staff. Emails claiming to be from the platform about your account, verification or a policy problem, aimed at your login or payment details. Kickstarter will not ask for your password, and anything urgent about your account is visible when you log in yourself. Go to the site directly rather than clicking through.

Backer-list sellers. “Access to 700,000 super backers.” Nobody has a list of Kickstarter’s backers, because Kickstarter doesn’t release one. What they have is scraped public data, or nothing.

Guaranteed-backers services. These are worse than a waste of money. Bought pledges are bots or throwaway accounts, they fail to collect at the end, and a flagged campaign can be suspended outright. I’ve written about why that maths never works in how to get your first Kickstarter backers.

Fake press and awards. A publication you half-recognise offers a feature for a fee, or you’ve been shortlisted for something you never entered. Check whether the outlet has ever covered a Kickstarter, and whether the email domain matches the masthead.

How to check an offer that might actually be real

Paid promotion isn’t all a con. Legitimate newsletters, ad agencies and cross-promotion partners exist, and some are worth the money. The problem is that a real offer and a fake one look identical in an inbox, so you need a test that doesn’t rely on your gut.

Five questions, and a real operator answers all five without hesitating.

Who are you, on a domain? A company email, a website that existed before this month, a real address. Not a Gmail with a nice signature block.

What exactly am I buying? A newsletter slot on a named date, an ad campaign with a defined spend and target, a specific placement. “Promotion to our audience” is not a deliverable.

Show me the last three campaigns you did this for. Then go and contact those creators directly, through their campaign page rather than a contact they hand you. Creators are remarkably willing to tell you whether something worked.

What are the numbers? Subscriber count from the platform, open rate, click rate. Anyone selling audience access has these on a dashboard and can screenshot them in seconds.

What does it cost per lead or per backer? If the price only makes sense at a conversion rate nobody achieves, it’s not a deal. Sanity-check it against what you’d pay running the traffic yourself, which I’ve broken down in Kickstarter cost per lead in the UK.

Two failures out of five and you walk. And since founders keep asking me which of the named agencies are worth it, I collect creators’ actual experiences on my Kickstarter agency reviews page rather than guessing on their behalf.

The uncomfortable truth underneath all of this is that most paid promotion underperforms your own pre-launch list anyway, which is where the money usually should have gone.

Why creators are such easy targets

It isn’t stupidity. It’s structural.

A launching-soon page publishes your name, your product, your rough launch date and, implicitly, the fact that you badly need people to notice you. No other business type broadcasts quite that combination. You are advertising both ambition and anxiety to anyone who cares to look.

Then there’s timing. These emails arrive in the fortnight before launch, when you’re exhausted, behind on everything and desperate for anything that might move the needle. Someone offering a shortcut for €150 catches you at precisely the moment your judgement is worst.

And the price is calibrated to that. Nobody scrutinises $150 the way they’d scrutinise $5,000. It’s a rounding error against your ad budget, which is exactly why it works, and why the same person can run it fifty times a month.

If you get one of these and you’re not sure, forward it to me. Genuinely, no charge. I’d rather spend two minutes than have you lose the money, and I keep a note of the ones going round.

What to do when one lands

Don’t reply. Engaging confirms the address is live and moves you into the funnel, which is the entire purpose of that friendly first email.

If you think it might be real, ask for a short video call before anything else. It’s a friendly, entirely normal request between creators, and it is the fastest way to end this. Nobody wearing someone else’s name will meet you on camera.

And verify through a channel they didn’t give you. Find the real creator’s actual project page or company site and contact them there. If they genuinely wrote to you, they’ll say so. If they didn’t, you’ve told a fellow creator that someone is wearing their name, which they’ll want to know.

Report it to Kickstarter. I know reporting feels pointless, and one report is. Fifty reports naming the same address is how the account eventually goes.

And if you’ve already paid, contact your bank about a chargeback straight away. Card payments are sometimes recoverable. Bank transfers and crypto essentially never are, which is precisely why they’re the payment methods you’ll be steered towards.

The bit Kickstarter should own

Honest opinion: the platform is better placed to fix this than any of us.

They know which campaigns are in launching-soon. They know that new creators are the ones being targeted. A single prominent warning at project creation, naming the pattern in plain language, would cost them nothing and would inoculate most first-timers before the email arrives. The support article exists, but it’s a page you find after you’ve been scammed rather than before.

Until that changes, the defence is knowing the shape of it. Any stranger who compliments your project and then asks for money for a list they can’t evidence is running the same script, whatever name is at the bottom of the email.

Key takeaways

• Kickstarter scam emails target creators, not backers, and peak just before launch.
• The commonest one impersonates a successful creator using a free Gmail address.
• The first email asks for nothing; it exists only to start a conversation.
• Nobody can sell you Kickstarter’s backer list, because Kickstarter doesn’t release one.
• Ask for the newsletter archive and subscriber numbers; a real promoter has them.
• Ask for a two-minute video call. An impersonator will never appear on camera.
• Verify through a channel the sender didn’t give you, and report the address.

Want a hand with yours?

If you’re pre-launch and getting approached by people offering promotion, a second opinion is cheaper than the punt. The £60 strategy call covers which promotional channels are actually worth money for your category, and which are noise.

And if you’re deciding where a real budget should go instead, that’s most of what the coaching programme does. The honest answer is usually that the money belongs in your own pre-launch list rather than someone else’s.