Last Updated on 06/01/2022 by Nidhi Khandelwal
The world was promised the smallest phone by Mony, a fraudulent Chinese company that launched the smartphone scam on Aug ’21. Mint was heavily funded by 500+ backers all around the world.
These backers backed Mint Mony on an online crowdfunding micro site, IndieGoGo. The smartphone raised a total of 4,523,622 INR and 4,203,195 INR on september, 4 2021.
Angry funders smashed the discussion portal of this campaign. One of the funders, Govinda Ahuja commented that on contacting the Indiegogo authorities, he was informed that there was no sign of his contribution. There were others with similar issues of either not getting any response or denial of their contributions.
The phone was promised to come with features like dual sim slots, 3 inch screen, 1250mAh battery. Under the hood, the smartphone was to be powered by an unnamed 1.5GHz quad-core CPU along with 3GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage.
To lure investors the company put up a tagline for this campaign “A smallest 4G smartphone that can do it all” and added features that were irresistible. Mony Mint was priced at $150 (approximately Rs 11,131). As part of an early bird offer, the smartphone was available at $100 (approximately Rs 7,421) on Indiegogo. Apart from the $100 early bird slots, there were $115 and $130 Early Bird, and Indiegogo Special slots, respectively. The company also said that the shipping of Mint would start from November.
This is not the first scam that took place via IndieGoGo. There have been a lot of crowdfunding scams and allegations of fraud on IndieGoGo over the years and it’s time for the whole world to open its eyes and look past these “too good to be true” campaigns.
