For everyone who thinks I’m getting $500+ dollars a month, let me just show you how a ton of those pledges are false andhow a lot of people have been getting content on my Patreon for free.
There are other cases. Some people who know that Patreon charges you at the beginning of the month, mysteriously unsubscribe a few days before that happens, after they got all the content for free of course.
Before you ask, no I don’t delete patrons, because I can never be sure if it’s a legit error, like a bank denying Patreon to charge you (which has happened before with some people and has been fixed), or a guy trying to see all my content for free. And aside from deleting them, there’s not much I can do, at least not that I’m aware of.
I know that by making this post I’ll actually encourage some people to try and get “free access”. But I wanted to show you all how we artists struggle to get paid even when we “block content behind a paywall”.
I hope that Patreon and other sites improve their “scam detection” or however you call it, since this has been an issue for as long as I’ve been using it.
If you’re an artist struggling with this as well, give it a reblog and maybe we can bring attention to this issue and to make people understand how hard it is to actually get paid as an artist, even while blocking your content.
Welp, that’s stunner, tehlumineko, and alasou so far that I know of getting a bunch of these. I know at least Lumi got 19 fake 20 dollar ones in a month.
Keep an eye out for things like them only patroning you and having weird generic names stunnerpone. Greg338 or whatever. Those are undoubtedly fakes and all it does is give them access to your stuff and make you seem like you’re making more than you are.
Yup… Happened to me… It is a real struggle…
It is so dumb how they don’t charge you at the time you pledge. Like Twitch does ffs.
^^^^^
I don’t know either. And why do they let people whose credit cards have been declined keep getting access to content?
Same Problem.
I don’t know if these are real people or bots, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news but on top of all this our art is getting reposed somewhere. And I bet that they are connected.
All those are links to all the art that has been uploaded to Patreon from the Artists listed. So this is how bad the problem actually is. And that is assuming stuff isn’t getting uploaded in other locations.
I found out about this about 2 weeks ago and I probably should have said something about this a bit earlier but I just didn’t know how to bring it up without drawing a ton of attention to the site (which I’m not gonna link for that reason) and I didn’t want to dishearten other artists cause this shit is extremely depressing. -_-
But I do know personally that non of my nsfw exclusive art has been reposed to this site cause I luckily decided to email that stuff out to my patrons instead of posting it to patreon. So if you do any exclusive stuff I recommend switching to that. Email any exclusive artwork after payments are done so you can filter out the scammers and thieves.
I’ve brought this up to Patreon Staff and they are looking into it but the realistic thing is that there are always going to be pirates and we will just have to do our best to grin and bare it. Its sad but that’s how it is. Lets try to support each other and keep going.
