Kickstarter-Funded LinkWallet Misses Promised Deadline For Refunds

Last year, we shared the frustrations of people who backed a product called PingWallet, (later LinkWallet) on Kickstarter. The wallets were supposed to ship at the end of 2013, then were delayed to the end of 2014. When that deadline passed, the founders declared that they would issue refunds to backers by December 22, 2015. That would be a satisfactory result if those refunds had ever been sent.

Yes, it’s December 2015, and those promised refunds have never come. We tried to contact the co-founders for another interview, and found that the contact information that we had for them is no longer valid. It also happens that no one from the company has logged in to their Kickstarter account in over a year to receive messages there.

What should backers do going forward? They could draw inspiration from two other cases of crowdfunded projects that were never delivered, Asylum playing cards and the board game The Doom That Came To Atlantic City, the creators of which were sued by the Washington state attorney general and the Federal Trade Commission respectively.

Here in New York, for example, that department is called the Consumer Frauds Bureau. In Florida, the state where the founders of LinkWallet lived at the time, it’s called the Consumer Protection Bureau. Contact the equivalent department in your state or territory for help.