SPLIT SCREEN

The crowdfunded phone of the future was a multimillion-dollar scam

By Adi Robertson@thedextriarchy Aug 13, 2019, 8:17am EDT

In 2014, Jeffrey Tschiltsch opened an email from Indiegogo and saw the future of computing. The email showed something called the “Dragonfly Futurefön,” a kind of computer-phone hybrid. The Futurefön’s page showed a sleek, palm-sized touchscreen that slotted into a laptop dock, then folded flat and flipped open again, revealing a second screen and a full-sized laptop keyboard. It could run both Windows and Android, and its creator, a startup called IdealFuture, promised to replace your phone, laptop, and tablet at an incredible price of $799. Dubious but intrigued, Tschiltsch put down a $200 deposit.

Five years later, Tschiltsch still wouldn’t have a Futurefön. Instead, he’d be sitting in an Illinois courthouse testifying at the behest of the FBI, which claimed the device was the last step in a decade-long fraud operation that cost victims nearly $6 million. “I always thought it was ambitious,” Tschiltsch says now. “It didn’t occur to me that the guy had just taken the money.”

Tschiltsch is just one of many angry Indiegogo backers who say Futurefön creator Jeff Batio strung them along with lies, excuses, and faked product updates. But the backers aren’t just angry with Batio. They’re frustrated by how easily a scammer could flourish in the high-risk world of gadget crowdfunding — and how poorly Indiegogo was equipped to deal with it.

According to its crowdfunding campaign, the Dragonfly Futurefön was a convertible, dual-screened notebook meant to dramatically simplify computing. Its “Slingshot” section was a 7-inch Android phone with a stylus, but that was only one part of the device. That phone plugged into a split-hinged keyboard base, which was also equipped with a slide-out touchpad, a second 7-inch display, a dockable Bluetooth headset, and a separate battery and processor.

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A closer look at Batio and IdealFuture might have raised several red flags. IdealFuture had posted reams of 3D models but virtually no pictures of actual hardware — a practice that Kickstarter had banned two years earlier, but Indiegogo had not. The Dragonfly Futurefön’s specs seemed almost impossibly good; its 7-inch phablet weighed precisely as much as the far smaller Samsung Galaxy S5 phone, for instance. And while Batio had been working on experimental computers for decades, he hadn’t actually shipped any — including a laptop he’d already promised Indiegogo backers in an earlier campaign. His ventures had left a string of disgruntled investors and contractors, some of which might have been ready to talk if anyone called them. But the Futurefön raised hundreds of thousands of dollars before anybody picked up the trail.

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