<p>Crowdfunding fraud represents an understudied yet increasingly prevalent form of business fraud with significant ethical implications. Despite increasing reports of deceptive crowdfunding campaigns, little is known about how these campaigns persuade funders and achieve success. Using a phenomenon-driven approach and drawing on source credibility theory, we examine how the effectiveness of three credibility cues (i.e., trustworthiness, attractiveness, and expertise) differs between fraudulent and non-fraudulent crowdfunding campaigns in forecasting their success. We theorize that subjective cues (i.e., trustworthiness and attractiveness) are especially persuasive for fraudulent campaigns, while objective cues (i.e., functional expertise) are more influential in non-fraudulent ones. Analyzing a matched-pairs sample of 204 Kickstarter campaigns, we find that the effects of cognition-based and affect-based trustworthiness and physical attractiveness are significantly stronger for the success of fraudulent campaigns than non-fraudulent campaigns. In contrast, functional expertise is more influential in driving success for non-fraudulent campaigns. This raises important ethical concerns about how perceptual cues, often assumed to reflect genuine intent, can be strategically misused to simulate legitimacy, thereby blurring the line between ethical and deceptive conduct on digital business platforms (e.g., crowdfunding).</p>