Kickstarter already has plenty of exploitative scam campaigns. I knew (I use the term loosely, more like I had to ban from a social group for being offensively rude to women) one of the guys that ran a successful kickstarter. He hasn't updated his project in months, and his last updates were about how he's only spent a small amount of the money, is looking for a new dev team, and wants to hire a web developer on the cheap.

I knew it was a scam from the day I learned of it, just based on this guy's character and inexperience.

I can assure you that equity would be no different, unless the investments could be protected by law in some way. I don't really know how to prevent this sort of thing, investors needs to do their homework, but even that's not always accurate.