Photo by Marie De Jesus for The Verge
Doug Monahan, the creator of the failed iBackPack crowdfunding project, is settling with the Federal Trade Commission and has agreed to never crowdfund again. The agreement, filed today, comes after more than a year of back-and-forth between the agency and Monahan, who served as his own lawyer in the case. The FTC sued Monahan over claims that he misused the nearly $800,000 he raised on Kickstarter and Indiegogo to bring the backpacks to life and instead spent the money on personal expenses and bitcoin. The settlement expresses that Monahan doesn’t agree to any wrongdoing.
iBackPack launched on Indiegogo in 2015 and again on Kickstarter in 2016. Monahan billed it as a bag of the future that would “revolutionize” wearers’ lives. They’d be…