Well, in this case at least there is the rest of the team who actually worked on the project (and published at least the software parts as they went, so there is publicly available proof that some work had been done).

Nowadays kickstarter requires that for the crowdfunding of such devices there is already a working prototype, so the people involved are supposed to have already invested quite some money (and time), making running away with the kickstarter money less attractive. of course this doesn't prevent failures like this one, when just one part of the team means steal the money. I don't even know how much kickstarter checks that this prototype actually exists and works, other than through the images/videos posted on the project page.