UPDATE 2: According to sources close to Benson, during the demonstration of Arist coffee maker functionalities to the HK government, they hired paid actors to demonstrate the brewing. It is speculated they used some special effect or techniques to fool the viewers that the machine can actually brew coffee.
UPDATE 1: Here is a link to the controversial Hong Kong program closely tied to HK financial secretary John Tsang Chun-Wah which did a dollar for dollar match.
An anonymous source tells Arist Scam that the Hong Kong government matched Kickstarter proceeds. Seems like Arist allegedly received over $800,000 dollars from both KS and Hong Kong, and the scam is that even if they had to refund everyone on Kickstarter, they’d still get to keep that money.
Of course we all know that when you back a project on Kickstarter there’s almost no recourse if a project fails. But the biggest scam seems like that even if Arist chose to refund a huge percentage of backers, they would still get to keep that money from the Hong Kong government!
So the hacking may be a front for explaining away future failure [even though so far Arist has promised to push forward].
Now, nobody on the HK blogosphere knows whether they were really hacked. The best explanation to me is that Benson is lying. How can his website be compromised for anything other than credit card information of preorders and website data? If the hack did happen, maybe it was to steal a bunch of credit card information? Doubt any Intellectual Property was stolen. But using this hacking excuse, if it happened, they can explain away failures like not being able to obtain a patent.
There’s been speculation for months that Arist is not new to patent some of the tech they’re promising, and thus they were in for a rude awakening when they went to file.