Is Indiegogo A Scam?

















Indiegogo Review
Name: Indiegogo
Website: https://www.indiegogo.com
Price: Free to sign up and create a campaign
Owners: Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin, Eric Schell
Overall Rank: 7.8 out of 10
Indiegogo – Product Overview
Is Indiegogo a scam? What is Idiegogo?
This company was founded back in 2008 in the greatest city by the bay, San Francisco. Indiegogo was a real trailblazer, as it was one of the first companies to offer crowdfunding. Crowdfunding helps people get much-needed money to further their movie, idea, business, charity, book and just about whatever and I do mean whatever, as you will see later. Famous actors, like James Franco, used Indiegogo to fund his Palo Alto Stories, Indie film for example.

Indiegogo is the platform from which entrepreneurs can create a campaign to raise money and to have contributors (donors, investors or customers) fund a campaign, by donating money. Whereby, Indiegogo takes a slice of the pie, a 5% cut from contributors donations. If thru a credit card the CC takes 3% and $0.30. With an astounding 15 million visitors to their site a month, they sure do have the eyeballs to help get your campaign funded.
As you would imagine this is just ripe with the people wanting money for fictitious ideas or scams or just pure laziness. On the other hand, it is filled with positive socially benefiting ideas that need to be funded to make this a better world to live in. The yin and yang, the good and the bad. Revolutionary ideas and platforms are just plagued with scams as well as legitimate social causes.
Perks
What do people get for contributing to a campaign? Well that varies, as each campaign offers something different. Perks can be in all forms, sizes, and prices.There are rules as some things that can’t be used as a perk.

Some examples of perks.
- Public acknowledgment
- A thank you note.
- A part in a movie.
How It Works
There is basically a three-step approach to get a campaign going til completion.
- Pre-launch
- Crowdfunding
- Marketplace
Some Examples of Successful Campaigns At Indiegogo
An example of a successful pitch video that was funded at Indiegogo.
- Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum $1,370,461.00 raised
- A bullied bus driver money for a vacation $703,123 raised.
- Skully Smart Motorcycle Helmet $2,445,739 raised.
- Save Lakota Sacred Land
- Solar Roadways $2,200,341 raised.
- Raised Money for Hurricane Sandy survivors.
The Good & The Bad
The Good:
- Flexible Funding – This is where if you don’t meet your goal, you still get to keep whatever money you did raise. Whereas some crowdfunding, it is all or nothing approach which is called Fixed Funding, if you don’t reach your set goal, you get no of the money. As long as you can fulfill on your perks and
- Allows you to accept PayPal payments and credit cards. But going to be hit with the PayPal 3 to 5% fee from them.
- Little to no rules. Which allows you to be crowdfunding as quickly as possible.
- Generosity.com was launched to help people raise money for emergencies, nonprofits, medical treatments and expenses, social causes, or other life events. As they take no cut for their platform fee. So more money is available to the cause.
- A great and fantastic platform to get important projects done with the help of conscientious people willing to donate their money.
- Easy to create campaigns to help you raise money.
- One-click social media integration feature, that readily shares with all your social media pages.
The Bad:
- People asking for money that don’t have a serious idea or plan and obviously are just wanting money to be given to them. The biggest reason this is perceived a scam. iDubbzTV on YouTube hysterically and intellectually calls out these individuals in which he calls Indiegogo Excrement and also does one on Kickstarter, called Kickstarter Crap. Highly recommended.
- Indiegogo makes money off of scams campaigns as well as legit campaigns because they take the 5% cut from all donations. So in theory, the more scams they allow, the more money they take in. Thereby biting the hand that feeds you.
- Accepts all projects without review. Ripe for people wanting to take advantage of other people.
- The hard part is getting people awareness about your campaign.
- People copy ideas from legitimate campaigns and just change the names in an effort to get money.
Indiegogo Alternatives
- Kickstarter
- GoFundMe
- YouCaring.com
- CrowdRise
- DonorsChoose.org
- Kiva
- Giveforward
- RocketHub
- Peerbackers
Who is Indiegogo for?
For anybody, for whatever reason, you can create a campaign at Indiegogo in the hopes of having money donated to you. Yep, anybody. It’s great for raising money for social programs that would otherwise get no funding. This is the true shining beautiful part of Indiegogo, being a part of a greater cause and contributing to it.
Indiegogo Tools & Training
The training and tools to get your campaign off the ground at Indiegogo are vast. They have a pretty thorough training from running a campaign to contributing to a campaign. They even have a downloadable free Film Handbook to help with your video production.
Indiegogo Support
Support is easily accessible at Indiegogo, and the various forms of support are all here. So it has all of the normal forms of support.
My Final Opinion of Indiegogo
Is Indiegogo a scam? Obviously, Indiegogo isn’t a scam but…there can be scam campaigns within the Indiegogo site. How do you find out which one are the scams? There are many legit campaigns that deserve getting funded and many scams that don’t deserve even the time to read about them, let alone watch a video about them. Some scam campaigns are easily detected by our bullshit meter and others that seem legit but are not in fact not legit. As some nefarious individuals copy legit campaigns and just change the name to appear legit. As mentioned above, the YouTube Channel iDubbbzTV runs through some of the dishonest ones, and you can get a sense of the tactics used to better inform yourself. Also check out Indiegogo post on How to Evaluate a Campaign, before contributing, which gives some good tips to avoid the scams.
Yes, there are scams at Indiegogo, but also there is greatness, the greatness of humans, its when we as humans look outward and want to make a bigger positive effect on the world and have legitimately found a way. This way needs money, and this is a great platform for this to take place

Indiegogo at a Glance…
Name: Indiegogo
Website: https://www.indiegogo.com
Owners: Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin, Eric Schell
Price: Free to sign up and create a campaign
Overall Scam Rank: 7.8 out of 10
VERDICT: LEGIT
If you have any questions or comments, I would be more than happier to answer them. Thanks.
Share This:


















Bravo, I’ve never heard of Indiegogo. I didn’t know that there was a Kickstarter alternative, sweet!!! I really like the example campaign video about the future of our roadways using Solar energy and technology to really bring us into the 21st century. I will definitely be checking out Indiegogo.
Hey Chris, The solar freaking roadways is a great example of the proper use of video to get your campaign funded. It’s funny and keeps you glued to the screen, all the while promoting your campaign. Glad I could help.
The fact that Indiegogo has been around since 2008 certainly lends some credibility to the site.
Also, it’s been around and I never heard of it [I don’t exactly live under a rock] attests to the enormity of the World Wide Web.
It’s a shame that a wonderful platform like this does not have checks in place to weed out the scammers but I guess you are right at the end we need to rely on our bullshit meters to avoid being scammed by Indiegogo or any other crowd funding platform.
I also didn’t hear of Indiegogo til a couple of months ago. I found this whole concept of crowdfunding interesting and wanted to do a post on them. I couldn’t agree with you more on the wonderfulness of the platform, but it needs more filters to weed out the scams.
2 out of 4 Indiegogo campaigns I contributed were SCAMs and I don’t expect to ever see the product. Avoid wasting your money.
They 100% scammers, I pay a perk and every time I asked for it, they claim product must go on manufacture after ONE WEEK !!!
The product is AllBe1 the link is there https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/allbe1-your-all-in-one-personal-security-guardian/x/14916591#/ – I get mails from Zvi Rozenfeld (guess the name is fake any way)
So after 45 days, they do nothingh only they raise found from people who believe on their lies…In my opinion the people from Indiegogo are agree with the scammers because they get comission .
It diffidently puts Indiegogo in weird positions because this is how they get paid as you say commission. Whether its a legit company or a total scam. Sorry that this turn into a lost cause for you. They sure have raised a lot of money already. My advice would to walk away, it’s really hard to know what company is legitimate. Thanks for the comment and information.
AllBe1 is a scam, the money was raised on June 2015 and still waiting for the delivery.
The company does not respond emails.
I propose to whom believed on them and went ripped off )like me) to organize ourselves to not permit that this is scam is for free for the scammers.
Indiegogo has a responsibility on this too as they earned money with the scam.
It seems counterproductive for a company to make financial gains from scams, but that is the system in place at Indiegogo. Thanks for sharing your experience and letting other people know about it.
Indiegogo is a total scam. Products are always available next month and then one more month and then another month. What a load of bullshit. Look at all the products, not one is available NOW.
I was scammed by BIMOZ . I made contact with the campaign owner Roland Escher and asked him directly ” is the product available now?” His reply, it is available now and selling exclusively on indiegogo. So I ordered and paid, next came an email about how the production was progressing, then another about testing , another about ” supplier hold ups”. That was several months ago. It’s nothing but a scam site.
Scams are obviously present at Indiegogo, it is ripe for people looking to take other peoples money. That being said there are also legit startup business and ideas found frequently at Indiegogo. It’s up to the people to research it and hope for the best. Thanks Howard, for sharing your experience, someone else might stay away from the BIMOZ now.