With age comes wisdom and one of the things I’ve learned over the past decade is to not participate in crowdfunding projects. With the exception of “Bring back MST3K,” these projects are almost always late, underwhelming, and fall far short of the initial vision. A good example of this is the Sense sleep tracker. Sense had this little receiver that you would clip to your pillow and a glowing orb that would sit on your nightstand. Between those two things and the mobile app, you’d receive feedback about your sleep quality and over time, be able to track your sleep time and overall restlessness. Sense eventually ran out of money, failed to find a buyer, and the hardware and software became abandonware. I am pretty sure that nice little nightstand orb currently lives under my daughter’s bed (author’s note: this has been confirmed).
This blog post isn’t about Sense though. Despite the failure of that business, Sense shipped a product and supported that product until the company ultimately ceased to exist. This blog post is about Segway Ninebot and how they stole from me and hundreds (thousands?) of other backers.
Most of us know what Segway is because of its famous original offering, the Segway PT. The PT, which was originally pitched as a product that would change the way that cities were designed, became somewhat of a ubiquitous novelty. You can still take Segway tours of major cities. It was also the preferred means of transportation by fictional mall security guard, Paul Blart. Segway, once an US-based company, was acquired by the Chinese-based Ninebot back in 2015 which made the consumer market more of a priority and ultimately abandoned the PT. (Me waving: hi, I am that consumer, I am your target market.)
Living just outside a major city, it is impossible to ignore the rise of electric scooters, skateboards, and unicycles. Whether it is almost getting hit by one or seeing them strewn about on the sidewalk, they are everywhere. I noticed this back in 2019 and decided that rather than rent a scooter from Bird or Lime, I’d just buy my own. Who would I buy it from? Segway Ninebot, of course. I saw their IndieGoGo campaign for the Ninebot MAX, the “ultimate” electric scooter. For around $700 USD, I thought I’d give it a shot. After all, as a product backed by Segway, the only risk was that the scooter would collect dust (see prior comment on Sense orb). Surely there’s no way they’d just take my money and not deliver a product, right? On May 25, 2019, I pulled the trigger on my purchase. I expected the product to be delivered sometime in late 2019 and that was fine. I waited 25 months for a Tesla so less than a year would be a piece of cake.
Every few weeks, I’d get an email update from the campaign and everything seemed fine, if not uneventful. Around update number #24 I recieved a notice that UPS had cancelled my shipment. I reached out to “wecare@segway.com” (spoiler alert: they do not in fact care) with the following email:
When I didn’t hear back, I emailed them again and then again. I followed-up with Indie GoGo. I was told to talk to some people at “Longham Tec” and while these people were helpful at first, they eventually stopped communicating and never got me to a point of resolution. My wife, being both resourceful and unapologetically confident, reached out to executives at all of the associated companies over LinkedIn. Some of them replied but no one was able to help. She even called in the unstoppable force of Facebook lawyer moms (do not mess with these people, consider yourself warned) but even they were no match for the wall of silence built by these con artists.
Throughout this entire process, I’ve maintained that there are two acceptable outcomes:
- Give me a full refund
- Provide me with the product that I paid for or a similar/equal replacement
You may ask yourself, why would you even want a product from these scumbags after three years of getting ignored? It’s a fair point and to be clear, option #1 is preferred. From my perspective though, it’s pretty simple: option #2 is significantly preferable to option #3 which is to get nothing.
I’m a fairly busy person but every few months I take a minute to send emails to Segway Ninebot and IndieGoGo to see if anything has changed and if anyone feels like helping me out. A few people from IndieGoGo have tried to be helpful, but they just refer me back to the “wecare” email address which we’ve already established is just a way for Segway to mock people that they’ve scammed. During my latest round of communications with Indie GoGo, I stopped back at the original campaign page for the Ninebot MAX scooter. I hadn’t been there in awhile and this is what I found:
This whole time I thought my situation was unique and that while all these other backers were just scooting around, both legs in the air, high-fiving passersby, I was getting ripped off. In reality, EVERYBODY has been getting ripped off. You can go through the comments yourself right here.
I almost forgot the best part: they added me to their mailing list! So not only have they kept my money and not delivered a product but they also continue to send me opportunities for new campaigns and reminders of how much money they raised for other products. It’s like God-tier, hall of fame, Elon Musk level trolling here, to the point where it’s almost impressive. I’m not sure I’d have it in me to steal from someone and then ask for more money but some people’s brains are just that powerful.
It’s been over three years. At this point, it’s not really about the money. It’s about two companies (Ninebot and IndieGoGo) just saying that this sort of thing is OK and it should just be left alone. The point of this post is that it’s not OK. It’s not OK to take someone’s money and provide them with no product and no refund and no communication. There’s better customer service from guys who sell mixtapes outside the subway. IndieGoGo can absolutely shut down Segway Ninebot’s current campaigns and suspend them from the platform. Why ruin a good thing though? After all, they get a cut of this action regardless of whether or not the product actually ships.
If you work at IndieGoGo or Segway Ninebot and you’re reading this, I am publicly asking that you make this right. Find all the people that never got a product and give them a refund. That’s it. Easy. I’m not a lawyer but my strong suspicion is that there are some lawyers who specialize in consumer grievances. Anyone out there want to help?
