myles
Junior Member
Posts: 62
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Post by myles on Sept 28, 2014 13:56:03 GMT
I suppose this all started some years ago with regard to a possible scam on eBay by Dimitri Albino. much more detail can be found at kicksucker2013.blogspot.co.ukThen the Kickstarter funding of Smartmaker where few backers saw any reward at all. Enter Harold Timmis with the $9 Arduino clone in partnership with Smartmaker, now on IndieGoGo, which was so successful that the next campaign attracted 4299 backers , who have been repeatedly lied to in the sporadic project updates. The new campaign, /3378942#home, with urgency to get funded in order to miss the Chinese New Year upheavals, is now not going to be sending out any rewards within 1 year. Indiegogo have not appeared to care much about the issues raised by the backers, from whom they received some $30.000.00 in commissions. Alberto Piganti's (PighiXXX) fantastic ABC Book, was a successful project, also in partnership with Smartmaker. I do hope he is getting royalties for the book now being sold with a kit from Smartmaker on Aliexpress. So, we are led to believe the BE MAKER project is crawling along, while being constantly lied to. Harold is now supposedly soldering components by hand while moving house. Watch this space !
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myles
Junior Member
Posts: 62
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Post by myles on Sept 28, 2014 17:57:01 GMT
The villains Attachments:
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Post by kicksucker on Sept 30, 2014 0:57:46 GMT
In an effort to provide some history on how this scam came to be and why I have been so vigilant in my efforts to shut these guys down; I'll try to put together a concise layout of the events that transpired. It is important to know the history in order to understand the current events. This is currently a work in progress, I will delete this line when I am done. On 10/25/2012 Dimitri Albino launched the opensource smARtDUINO campaign on Kickstarter which closed on 11/23/2012 collecting $157,571 from 982 backers. In his Kickstarter home page, Albino asserted "For years we manufactured the ARDUINO in Italy - this claim was promptly negated by Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi who stated he had never heard of Dimitri Albino and neither had the head of factory who produces his boards in Italy. Additionally, Massimo sent a cease and desist letter to Kickstarter based on a trademark infringement. In his post Banzi also made the comment "Italian speakers will find some old forum messages linking this person to some dubious activity" 11/08/2012 Albino announced via Kickstarter update #14 "the new Global Partner of Every Maker: smARtMAKER. smARtMAKER is our brand new global retail facility for all the products that a Maker needs." Albino cited 3 worldwide warehouses; China, Italy and US in Orlando, FL. It was later discovered that the smARtMAKER US warehouse in Orlando, FL was actually an condo located at 4225 Thornbriar Lane #304, Orlando, FL 32822. Per Albino's comments he purchased the property via eBay for $10k which he brought into the US through JFK airport in 2010. As of 2013 the property had a tax lien for failure to pay taxes owed. Also located were some other violations of housing association regulations. 11/13/2012 via Update #18 Albino referred to smARtMAKER as "our distribution channel"
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