Kickstarter closed the project after users pointed out that everything was copied

May 2, 2012 09:09 GMT  ·  By

A number of individuals calling themselves Little Monster Productions tried to dupe KickStarter users into believing that they were looking for funding to develop an RPG game called “Mythic: The Story of Gods and Men.” A few days ago, some users noticed that in reality, all the preview elements were copied and pasted from other projects.

The scam artists tried to convince people to back their funding in an attempt to raise $80,000 (60,000 EUR), but fortunately, they only duped 83 individuals into donating a total of $4,739 (3,600 EUR).

To make everything as legitimate-looking as possible, the fraudsters claimed they had been previously employed by Blizzard and Activision. They even made t-shirts and swords that would allegedly be given to contributors.

“The gameplay characteristics will be similar to that of World of Warcraft and the graphics quality should be up there with Skyrim. Game will be release on PC first and then ported to Mac. Depending on funding amount reached we will aiming to get a multiplayer version online by Summer 2013,” the crooks wrote.

After one of the members of KickStarter pointed out that all the graphics and even the swords were taken from other projects and websites, Little Monster Productions made one final effort to keep its reputation clean.

“As for the concept art, it seems we have been subjected to false claims of ownership right to our concepts. The game itself is well in progress and is NOT a scam of any kind,” they explained.

Shortly after the post, KickStarter closed the project.

To demonstrate that everything was a scam, a contributor of the Rock, Paper Shotgun forum took every element and showed where it was copied from.

After being presented with the evidence, the fraudsters crawled back to their cave.