French Police Investigate Sans Detour & Seek Information
December 18, 2020 by avernos
A bit of a departure from our regular programming, but we received an email from the French Judicial Police regarding the company Sans-Detour. For years they were a massive draw throughout the roleplaying and wargaming community but with two unfulfilled crowdfunding campaigns, they are currently under investigation regarding these for criminal prosecution.
To date, most of the information regarding this has been solely in French which is why the French Assets Recovery Office has reached out to see if we can share this information to those affected who may not be aware of the ongoing investigation. Almost 10,000 people backed the two projects on the respective platforms and will have already received an email, however late backers using the store or backerkit will not so here is the current information for backers of either;
→ “ Adventures - The Game ” campaign carried out between 02/10/2017 and 03/11/2017 on the ULULE.COM website.
→ “ Confrontation - Classic The legendary skirmish game ” campaign carried out between 04/16/2018 and 05/17/2018 on the KICKSTARTER.COM website.
The Assets Recovery Office have sent a statement detailing in full the procedure to follow that can be read here on ulule.com A Letter with a questionnaire has been sent out along with a complaint form for people to complete if they wish to be included in the legal action. Filing the complaint is free, and if you are a contributor to either project and have not received the letter then you can request a copy by the following.
- You can request it by sending an email to [email protected]
- Indicate in the subject line: REQUEST LC - Last name + First name
- This completed letter must be returned to the following email: [email protected]
- Indicate in the subject line: RETOUR LC - Last name + First nameuv.fr
Please note that the emails are not the same
IMPORTANT: The completed and signed standard letter must reach us BEFORE the 01/15/2021.
For those contributors outside France, you can join the above legal action, so if you were unlucky enough to have backed either project I urge you to read the full press release and if you wish to be involved take the time to request and complete the forms.
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Ooh Wow an they wonder why people are apprehensive of kickstarters.
To be fair, this project was red flag circus from the start, and it only got worse as time went on and we found out more about them.
ill take your word on that I’ve heard many story’s of bad and good Kickstarters but nothing on this one until the post cane out.
Yeah, it was bad. Sans Detour was not an ok company. It shows if you check out the Kicktrack for the campaign- something doesn’t defund like this unless there’s an issue. They never even sold through their early bird pledges because so many people were jumping ship.
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– They were a company with no experience in miniatures that were offering these prices- and they felt that they could offer these extremely low prices for a bundle of minis, but it was also made clear that they hadn’t yet lined up a manufacturer. That was on their ‘to do’ list.
– The big one for me was that the money just didn’t add up. Their funding vs. the number of unique plastic molds that they’d need to make was just crazy (a lot of bulky and large minis were included in the pledge). It was better than Reaper Bones prices by a wide margin and was obviously too good to be true.
This is a project that would be undelivered unless the company had a LOT of funds from elsewhere that they could use to bail it out. Which they didn’t, see below.
– The creators had a two stores called Ludik (separate business licenses for their brick and mortar and online locations). These companies had the same headquarters as Sans Detour registered and everything. One of them had folded fairly recently, and the other went out of business during the Confrontation campaign.
To me, this was pretty solid evidence that the company didn’t have the money to bail out and deliver their project.
– Sans Detour did not own the rights to Confrontation, it licensed them from Stellar Holdings. Stellar was owned by one of the principals of Sans Detour, and the only thing that company does is own Confrontation and collect a licensing fee from Sans Detour. So they had everything set up so that they could walk away from this project having delivered nothing and really not lost anything either.
– The front page of the campaign was only a bunch of photoshopped images of Rackham stuff anyway. While it looks good, it represents a pretty minimal investment on the part of Sans Detour to get the project up.
– They offered some extremely expensive all resin tiers for the miniatures sets. While these were expensive, they came out to far too little for what they were promising.
– When the project started to rapidly defund due to backers noticing all of these problems, Sans Detour’s reaction was to just unlock all of the stretch goals. So now the deal is even better than the best deal on plastic or resin minis around (still with no manufacturer in sight).
– The company was aggressively bad at communication. Not only did they have very few updates during the campaign, but they also had fans tending to the comments section with official collaborator badges (these fans were associated with the Con’federation French fan group). Naturally, they didn’t know anything relevant, could not answer questions about anything important and accused any backers who brought up any of the red flags of being saboteurs working for Legends of Signum.
>After the campaign,
– They told Kickstarter that the Legends of Signum campaign was infringing on their Confrontation copyrights and got that Kickstarter shut down- seemingly based on bad blood with that company. Signum remains the only Kickstarter I have ever seen come back from a copyright dispute, and while it lost a lot of funding from that, they still delivered and made sequels.
– We found out that Sans Detour had not paid Chaosium royalties for their translation of Call of Cthulhu books into French. Chaosium pulled the license and made some official statements
– They started another Kickstarter for some completely new French Cthulhu stuff that was clearly based on things they’d planned to make with the Chaosium license. This project got shut down.
– Eventually, they announced that they couldn’t make good plastic minis of these Confrontation models, so they’d make all of them in white metal instead! And with Free Shipping for All. Of course, they’re opening their project up to new backers again, but at a higher price.
Naturally, that makes the economics of the situation even worse, and their statements made it clear that they really didn’t do the math.
This is basically to line up possible creditors, as Sans Detour is indeed in bankruptcy/liquidation proceedings in France. I doubt KS backers will be made whole through this process, but at least you get put on the list for possible partial redress of grievances.
It is also probably for information on how bad they defrauded people which will go to penalties or sentencing guidelines if someone is going to jail. There may not be a lot of money left to give out after they liquidate but it could help and civil or criminal proceedings.
It’s a criminal compliant procedure as I understood the letter. We may get some money if they find the principals guilty of fraud and by some miracle find they haven’t spent the lot (unlikely).
I posted to the Discord and to DakkaDakka both of which have dead threads since the KS went bust. What disappoints me is that there should be a way for the French Police to contact KS directly and then KS send out information to all the backers.
KS got their cut so they no longer care which sucks. Hopefully the information goes far and wide to get as many as possible to respond.
If you’re not in the US trying to get information out of KS to use in a criminal investigation is almost impossible. I’ve tried.
as I said above the backers through KS should already have received an email, this is really to help pick up people who pledged via their own store or late pledgers who didn’t go through KSer
Good to hear they won’t get away with this unpunished. I had been on the fence about the Confrontation KS as I have some of the old stuff and love it. Happy that I spent my money elsewhere.
Eh, sad to know that such a big endeavor burned quite a few people as the old figures were really ahead of their time for sculpting. Agreed that its good to see there’s something being done about it.
This was shady from the get go.
I have never seen a Crowdfund project loose so many backers during the last days of the crowdfunder where people started to loose trust.
For them it can only be the guillotine. Even if its a guillotine in tabletop size. We will find body parts to stick through the hole.
I pulled out when I saw the offering, the state of their preparations and marketing which were a dog’s breakfast. I left a dollar in to keep track in case they came to their senses. I feel terribly for those who were basically tricked out of hundreds of €.
Man…. its a good job I waited when this KS launched for Confrontation. Within weeks alarm bells were ringing and I avoided it like the plague.
GG WP. Better luck next time.
Has there been any update on the legal proceedings? If there were potential criminal charges, I’d love to know if they went anywhere or if the police decided not to pursue it further.