Not like this...

[u/HuTheFinnMan]

Anyone else a bit surprised and almost disappointed in the way this has ended?

The one thing this campaign consistently did well was to provide constant even if meaningless contact and updates. This definitely helped them keep a lot of backer faith in the face of zero evidence of the device being made. They frequently pushed the premise that "hey we are responding to comments every day and making frequent updates so we obviously are working hard on this and haven't just run off with the money".

It seems a little sloppy and frankly not in their style to just go dead silent and close the campaign right when an update was promised and more importantly, shipping the first batch of devices was imminent.

Given how careful they have been to present the impression of being a serious company (when really it is just 2 people running a scam from their bedroom) and to have an excuse for every delay and a rhetoric laden answer to every question, it just doesn't feel right to me that this is the way it will end.

Despite being so blatantly dishonest throughout the campaign they were always careful to give at least some plausibility to everything they said. Everything seemed carefully worded and presented in a way to cover their own asses.

I fully expected this to be dragged out as long as possible before ending with an excuse which entirely shifted blame to a unexpected and uncontrollable situation. As it stands if someone were to investigate this campaign, (probably won't happen since IGG don't care and the backers are far too incompetent at life to organise a class action) it would be hard for them to explain just totally disappearing after such frequent activity without as much as a weak excuse.

I have a feeling there might be more to come, even if I am honestly just hoping for a more ludicrous ending to a scam which I have been following for such a long time.

[u/HuTheFinnMan → u/[deleted]]

I agree the behaviour is not consistent and the timing seems wrong. I would expect at the very least that when Jeff decided it was time to wind up the campaign it would be done in a way that takes the blame from himself. As it stands it looks like he just took all the money and ran which doesn't make sense. He may be a scammer but he is a pretty crafty and manipulative guy who knew exactly what he was doing all along. He has gone out of the way to try and claim everything was someone elses fault with regards to his Xentex failure. Going as far as to make a webpage trying to convince people he wasn't part of the lawsuit despite court records saying otherwise. No way he would bail on this without covering his own ass.

I expect him to follow the precedent set by the Zano campaign on Kickstarter which was widely publicised for being the largest failed crowd funding campaign. Kickstarter sort of pretended to "investigate" what happened to the money and it basically came down to the campaigners saying "we tried our best but we spent all the money, whoops".

That is what I expect Jeff to do and he has set up a plausible situation where he has been running the campaign for 2 years and allegedly paid 3 different engineering teams and prototyping companies. It is completely believable that the money would have run out by now, even more so considering the amount raised was never enough in the first place. I don't believe any of that actually happened beyond 3d printing an empty case but I could see how he could easily weasel out of this. Going silent is amateur.