Did To Catch A Predator’s Chris Hansen Scam His Kickstarter Backers?

If you’ve frequented the Internet for a while now, you’ll know who Chris Hansen is. More meme than man, Hansen became well-known for his “To Catch a Predator” show with NBC’s Dateline, a TV series which ran from 2004-2007 and focused on luring predators into houses rigged with hidden cameras, under the guise that they were there to meet an underage child to engage in sexual acts with them. Despite the serious and often controversial nature of the show, it was also highly entertaining, as the men lured to the fake homes were often exposed as moronic and idiotic as they tried to talk their way out of an arrest–some would even try to run from the Police force waiting in the house. Hansen himself also became something of a meme, due to his idiosyncratic speech patterns and stock phrases (“I’m Chris Hansen”, “Why don’t you have a seat over there?” etc.) and the calm way in which he read out the perverted chat logs of sexual predators.

Despite the show’s cancellation in 2007, Hansen’s fans remained, and he had a strong following of people on social media who kept asking him if the show would ever make a return in one way or another. For a long time, there was no word of the show ever being brought back but then, in 2015, a surprise announcement was made that Hansen was looking for $75,000 USD to make a brand new, Kickstarter-funded show: Hansen vs. Predator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aOnf7qGSn0

The Kickstarter campaign boasted rewards for backers including coffee mugs, books, signed photographs and more. The campaign was accompanied by a decent amount of marketing, including a Reddit AmA, and managed to bring in a final total of $89,068 USD, when the campaign ended back in May of 2015. Rewards were estimated to arrive in December of the same year.

It is currently April 6th, 2017. Not one backer has received a reward.

If you go to the campaign page now, the comments are filled with angry backers, asking for some kind of update on where their rewards are, and urging for some kind of update from Hansen and the team. Kickstarter fails and scams are nothing new, but backers were pretty confident that someone of Hansen’s relative celebrity status wouldn’t leave people without the things they paid for.

As for what happened with the show itself, that’s another interesting story. Hansen vs Predator did actually materialise as part of a slot on “Crime Watch Daily”, an “American syndicated investigative news magazine series” which is distributed by Warner Bros. Television. Hansen himself hosts the show, and it follows much the same format as “To Catch a Predator”, only with updated luring methods. Unfortunately, for those fans who live outside of the US, there’s no way to watch the show legally, and backers also never received any of the special “behind the scenes” footage that they were promised as part of backing the campaign.

If I had to make an educated guess at to what happened, I would say that the production team assumed that Hansen’s name would bring in a lot more cash than they actually received (the stretch goals on the Kickstarter page go up to $1,000,000 USD) and they then had to use all of the funds from the campaign to actually go about funding the show’s production, leaving them with no money for the rewards. This is, of course, just a speculation on my part, and I want to make it clear that I’ve heard no official word from any of the production team or anyone involved with the Kickstarter, as have most of the fans who have tried reaching out to Hansen’s team.

As for getting any of our rewards, time will tell if they’ll ever be delivered, or if I’ll ever be able to drink out of a coffee mug that also reminds me of sexual predators.

Did you back the Kickstarter? What do you think of Hansen vs. Predator? Let us know in the comments below!