Scam alert? But probably perfectly legal!

I don't know whether to file this under "scam" or "a fool and his money are soon parted". Maybe it is 100% legit... or maybe you'll be reading about this again in 2021.

There is an "in-development" product out there called the "terraplanter". The details are a little vague about what it is made of, exactly, but it appears to be the 2020 version of the chia-pet. My best description would be "terracotter planter that you add water to, and water slowly seeps through the terracotta, allowing you to rub seeds on it and get them to germinate (like chia pet) or grow moss, etc".



Terraplanter

If that's all it was, no one would ever hear about it. However where this story take a turn for the absurd is that this company has been raising money via crowd-funding to pay for its development:

Our initial obstacle was the development process of the product. We needed to slow down the pace of working in order to see and focus on details that needed to be worked, re-worked, re-designed, tested, and iterated. Once we came to a working solution we moved to the next challenge which involved the plants. Here we needed to slow down even more and enter the time-scale of plants, waiting days and sometimes weeks to see if it grows, how it will grow, what grows, what doesn’t, and why. Bringing us back to the drawing board time and again.

So why should we care? Apparently on at least two sites (and maybe others) this company, via a slick web site, has raised over $13 million via more than 100,000 people to develop what is looks like a slip-molded terracotta pot that likely can be mass-produced for less than $1 per unit. And what gets even sketchier is that if you clicked on the link above, you may find yourself getting spammed with Google ads trying to raise more money.

Now one of the big "no-nos" of both Indiegogo and Kickstarter is to use your crowdfunding to pay for ads for more crowdfunding. Perhaps it is legit? However when I see that the company founder has a background in other crowd-funded projects, and the slick glossy web site to raise money for development of a terracotta pot... I wonder.

 

Interesting, but I’m afraid to click on the link

 

Anybody that would pay $62 for that deserves what they get. I imagine a lot of those people live in Portland, Seattle and Austin order them in droves.

 

Maybe this is the reason all those folks got sent seeds from China.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cb...eds-from-china-usda-investigation-identified/

 

No, the link is legit. I don't think this is anything illegal - it is just - how shall I put it - taking perfect advantage of a platform designed for other things. I think they would be complete fools to NOT deliver terracotta pots to everyone who signed up... after all they each paid $62 bucks - why not send them something worth $1? They're going to end up making $13 million, and paying out $100,000 in cost of goods sold...

 

Clicked on it. Hm, that’s actually a really cool idea, but why would someone spend that much for just a house plant?

 

When I went to business school there were three types of students: engineers looking to apply their math skills to business problems, marketing and HR types looking to add some seriousness to their resume, and flim flam artists hoping that a legit MBA would provide cover for their never ending list of shady ideas. Most of those guys went into selling mortgages, and you remember how that turned out...

 

I don't know, we have a grifter for a president. That takes more than just three cities to get conned for that to happen.

 

Conehead Chia Pet