Surely they'd have some level of liability. Safe harbor rules from laws like the DCMA certainly wouldn't cover deliberate fraud. There would be enough to file a case, anyway. And if it was filed and not tossed out, they'd probably settle rather than risk all the bad press.

I don't know if they'd be liable, but they could take action that would reduce the possibility of this kind of thing happening.

One very helpful tool would be setting a community expectation of weekly updates from funding time to shipping time. They can't really enforce a rule like that since they have no leverage over the project people once the money is released, but they can certainly set the expectation that frequent updates are the rule, not the exception.

There are some cases where frequent updates may not make sense, but for the vast majority of projects, there's got to be some sort of news to share on a weekly basis. It's surely not too much to ask of project people that they spend a few minutes every week updating those who made their project possible.

If there's literally not any news to share, then maybe that project is in trouble, and that too would be communicated if the standard was for weekly updates and the project wasn't following that guideline.

Setting a standard along those lines is certainly better than the current state of affairs.