Susan Wilson and her Kickstarter project (part II)

There is new development in the Susan Wilson’s  Kicksarter project, previously reported here. Looks like she and her husband are serial fraudsters. Dan Clark from theaibots.com has a nice article about the development of the story.

OK, the Susan Wilson Kickstarter story is getting seriously weird now…  Ever seen the film Catfish?

This is the sequel.  Real movie stuff.

I’ll even end on what will undoubtedly be the closing line of the inevitable Kickstarted documentary on the affair.

The NeoGAF thread has deduced that “Bobbi Lynn Peters” of this failed “Boycode” indiegogo project (a social network of sorts that doesn’t actually exist, funded  primarily by the Wilsons) is probably Susan, through the writing style and tropes of Wilson’s projects.

This prompted me to look further at “Bobbi Lynn”. One of the projects she posted a referral for in 2011  is “Super Awesome Yosmite (sic) Mud Hostel!” by Guy McBryde.

Again, the writing style of this hostel campaign seems familiar… but oh-ho, what else is familiar?

YES! The man in the video!

It’s Susan’s husband, Christian Wilson, from the “HELP Me Get These Kids Off Video Games & Hunting For Real Treasure” indiegogo!

The main giveaway is the voice, but they think we think Guy McBryde is obviously a COMPLETELY different person, as he has a beard and slightly different hair.

(edit: A number of people dispute that there is enough of a likeness considering the videos are only months apart. I will note that although we know when the videos were uploaded, we have no idea when they were filmed. I still think the voice is a dead giveaway.)

This hostel was proposed to be run as an “artisan studio” (a nebulous concept if ever I heard one) and was apparently being built in Groveland, California, at the gateway to Yosemite National Park.

Sadly the Groveland County Board of Supervisors didn’t agree with the plan and the hostel was stopped from being built.

Well, that’s what this one “newspaper” article says anyway…

That newspaper site appears to be the only source for any stories about Guy and Michelle McBryde and their hostel. I’d imagine that when the pledgers for the indiegogo enquired as to when they could come and visit the hostel for their rewards, they were sent this link by the “McBrydes”. That way, thought the Wilsons presumably, the backers would  believe that it wasn’t the “McBrydes” at fault, instead it was those meddling fatcats at city hall.

Maybe it was because the supposedly local couple couldn’t spell “Yosemite”…

Read the Union Democrat article above though. Really read it. It’s all bullshit, isn’t it?

“Michelle McBryde said this whole situation has still “created a financial hardship” for the couple from which they don’t know if they can recover.”

The perfect excuse to get those pesky-but-naive people who gave you their honest money off your back, eh?

I have an inkling that there’s a connection between Susan Wilson and the company that runs the Union Democrat (among other “newspapers”) but that will take some further investigation.

The hostel has a Youtube channel, which posted four videos while the indiegogo campaign was running. One video has “Guy” doing some fitness exercises with two boys who look remarkably like Susan’s sons from the Kickstarter pitch photo.

I believe this, of all of their indiegogo projects, is the smoking gun.

It’s a scam pure and simple.
The McBrydes don’t exist (even though, as with the Wilsons’ projects it looks like the McBryde family themselves pledged!).
The “mud hostel” didn’t exist.
And I’ll bet my bottom dollar that the planning application to the local authorities didn’t exist.

They’re clearly a very clever couple, clever enough to seemingly fake a news story to get away with a big tasty crowdfunded moneycake, though not quite clever enough not to follow the same patterns over and over.

And there is clearly a lot more detective work to be done for us to aid Susan in her quest for “truth and transparency”, but it’s getting pretty late here in the UK so I hope I’ve given enough breadcrumbs for people to unravel more of this intriguing mystery.

A good place to start could be to cross-reference indiegogo projects that you suspect may be the Wilsons under pseudonyms with stories from Western Communications‘ portfolio of news websites, which may give excuses for said projects not materialising, as with the example I found. Alternatively that could be a blind alley, too early to say; The rabbit-hole goes pretty deep with this one.

I posit that hostel backer Joanne Bacci is likely a Wilson sockpuppet. Not only do the comments on her page seem to bear Susan Wilson’s linguistic hallmarks and fondness for CAPITALS, but also “Joanne” sent referrals (spam!) for the campaign a whopping 311 times!

I believe the other two $100 backers,  Christi Stewart and Carole Borelli are likely to be Wilson creations too, but there aren’t quite the same “tells” in their comments. This is the only project any of the three have funded and if these backers were real and demanded their reward, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down. Quite like how it appears to be now.

But hey, crowd-funding is even more FUN and AWESOME if you make your own crowd, right?

If you guys figure out any more, let us know in the comments below.

After all, as Susan says herself in a Kickstarter update, “ I encourage truth seekers to research this thoroughly because once again, I LOVE THE TRUTH!”

I’ll leave you with this tidy little sign-off:

In the most recent video, there is a very telling quote from Guy/Christian that seems to sum up the Wilsons’ modus operandi…

Michelle McBryde (Susan) asks him “What’s an artisan studio?”.
His response?

“An artisan studio? I dunno… maybe it’s something I made up in my head…”

Susan Wilson and her Kickstarter project

Susan Wilson has created a Kickstarter campaign to pay for a programming weekend for her 9 year old daughter. The reason behind this? The brothers supposedly made fun of the girl and said that girls can’t make good RPGs. There’s also a $10,000 donation reward if you want a personal apology from the boys. You will notice how she even literally makes a graphic of the girl “Versus” her brothers. This begs the question what kind of a mother would publicly expose and shame his sons on the internet?  Link to the project’s page.

Well, turns out that this Susan Wilson is a Top Ten Female Entrepreneur, founder and CEO of The Judgment Group, a company that focuses on debt collection. She was featured on CNN Money as part of their list of The Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs.

So we have a person who is supposed to be a very successful entrepreneur (apparently a millionaire) and IS STILL asking money from others. Her Kickstarter campaign was only for $829, but the amount collected has now gone over $20,000. Her daughter is supposed to make a RPG out of this, but no specifics as to what the game will be/look like can be found. This isn’t how Kickstarter is supposed to work. The mother also apparently went out of her way to spam her Kickstarter campaign to women’s groups and even the Ellen Degeneres show’s Twitter account (it is against Kickstarters rules to spam a project):

There are 26 days left before she gets the money. Kickstarter can cancel everything and redact the funds, but we believe that they won’t as they are also making profits out of this.

The only solution left is to bring this story to the public. We’ve only got 26 days to share this information as much as we can and tell people to report the project. The only thing they need to do is to scroll down to the bottom of the project’s page and send a report message. We need to massively report this kickstarter project for what it is: a joke and/or a scam. The intent of this project was to capitalize on the whole gender politics garbage. And, no surprise, it succeeded. There are more than enough feminists, white knights and manginas out here, prepares to spend money on a brave (female) warrior fighting against the patriarchy (remember Anita Sarkeesian?). There are also more than enough gullible morons that fall to the herd mentality.