Dave just did a video about "buying likes/dislikes" on YouTube. That was an eye-opener for me. I didn't realize there are companies that do this kind of thing! Which led me to think about the same being true of Kickstarter and IndieGogo campaigns.
So here is a "thought".... Follow me along with this one:
PAYING TO KICKSTART A KICKSTARTER/GOGO AN INDIEGOGO
Someone decides to start up a crowd-funding campaign. The psychology of it is that if people see other people throwing money at something, they will be more likely to do it.
So the project creator pays a company to "pay" into a campaign. I'm not sure how this is done, whether you can use the same credit card to pay multiple times into a system or whether this can be circumvented or not.
Bottom line is, such a "crowd-funding backer" (CFB) company could have a bunch of fake users, multiple credit cards linked to those accounts, and pay into a campaign. The project creator would give the CFB company perhaps $105,000.... they would get back $100,000 from them, so net cost to CFB would be $5,000. Of course, IndieGogo or Kickstarter would also keep a percentage (maybe another 5% or $5,000 from the $100,000). This would leave project creator with $95,000 back.
So they effectively would have paid $105,000 to get back $95,000 and CFB would keep $5000 and crowd-funding site another $5000. Net cost for this service would be $10,000. What does this $10,000 buy you?
Well, having your campaign backed to the tune of $100,000 along the way may also be enough psychological motivation to entice perhaps another $200,000 out of other real people to join the campaign. So the project creator has lost $10,000 in order to potentially gain $200,000.
It reminds me of seminars where overly-enthusiastic people are "planted" in the audience (the "shill") to help encourage unsuspecting people to part with their money.
Now I know it is a bit of a "far-fetched" idea. But I didn't know things like this existed and were allowed until I saw Dave's video about YouTube paying for Likes/Dislikes and all this fake Google Plus+ and Facebook and other social media service companies. SO... Perhaps this stuff, if not already being done, may actually happen? What do you think?