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Comment by pud | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is fraud.

Looks to me like a mom & daughter made something together and put it on the internet.

I live in an affluent part of San Francisco (Noe Valley) and last week saw lots of rich moms selling girl scout cookies with their daughters, mom doing all the "work." Is that fraud?

Also, nowhere do I see anything in the article (or the CNN article it links to) about the mom's finances. Just because you have a business does not mean you're rich -- it often means the contrary.

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"last week saw lots of rich moms selling girl scout cookies with their daughters, mom doing all the "work." Is that fraud?"

Good strawman.

Of course, girl scout money goes to the Girl Scouts, and not the parents or the kids. Whereas, the money collected from this kickstarter goes into Mom's pocket.

So they aren't really he same at all. Of course you knew that.

The moms told me that about 20% goes to the Girl Scouts and the troop keeps 80%.

The local Girl Scout troop. ie: a local branch of the Girl Scouts. That changes absolutely nothing about my criticism of your post.

“Just because you have a business does not mean you're rich -- it often means the contrary.”

Very true, but that’s not the card she’s playing on her corporate website:

“Prior to starting The Judgment Group, Susan was a founding member and the Executive Vice President of a technology startup that raised $12 Million in venture capital, became kinkos.com, and was sold in 2000 to the copy giant Kinko’s for $100 Million.” [1]

It could be that she had no shares and didn't gain anything from the deal, but at the very least, she included the experience to appear that she gained from it.

[1] http://www.judgmentgroup.com/About_Us.html

Girl scout cookies don't cost $21,000+ and neither does RPG camp. You're right, it's probably not fraud, but it is a publicity stunt at Kickstarter's expense. I agree a good petition would be to redirect the funds to a real charity or cause.

Fraud requires a lie, which I don't see. Apparently "fraud" now means doing something that you don't like.

Personally, I think this could be great, if the parents are doing it properly. The daughter is learning how to achieve her goals with assistance from other people who give willingly, instead of mooching off mom and dad. A lot of children are lucky if they can manage to learn this lesson by the age of 18 (or later... I wasn't exactly an early bloomer here myself), and, managed well, this kid is going to have a good handle on it much faster than that.

It's a lie by omission. As a backer, you're missing a critical piece of information which would cause a lot of people not to fork over their cash. The only hint you get that mommy is not living from government handouts is that it's said she "sometimes has to hire programmers and developers for her work", and that she is a "business person", which might as well mean a freelance web developer struggling to make ends meet.

So what is little Mackenzie Wilson learning? How to achieve her goals "with assistance from other people"? Or that you can find plenty of suckers on the Internet if you pull on their heartstrings just enough?

The default assumption now is that people are living off government handouts until proven otherwise? Huh?

The default assumption is that, when you have to ask money from strangers to fund your kid's holidays, you're not flush with money. I used "government handouts" to drive the point home.

Everyone is focussed a bit too literally on the word "fraud" when it's more about the fact that a 9 yr old did not come up with this: http://i.imgur.com/F03oG3e.png. Which begs the question, how much money is mom going to pocket from this?

The 9 yr old is also not spamming celebs & women's groups on Twitter - http://i.imgur.com/b4l2fI2.png.

A non-fraud would have promised excess collected to other children and causes.

Perhaps the proper appropriation of the raised money is a better thing to petition for than the campaign's banning?

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