Patreon doing a.. thing
Added 2018-08-04 19:46:23 +0000 UTCJust a short note.
Its come to my attention that over the last week or so, Patreon switched their payment processors over to a UK based company. This seemed to have flagged and triggered fraud protections for some folks who use their credit cards for patronage.
I'm a bit behind on what the story is, as I don't do much 'Twitter' these days, and am not on Facebook at all, and most of this was announced on those two platforms. As is seemingly the normal procedure now, large changes like this are almost never discussed with or mentioned to creators outside of broadly noting on their social media streams that there was a problem after the fact.
From the little I understand, if you use PayPal, you won't have any problems, and they mentioned that they were e-mailing people affected by this directly to explain what was going on. I hope this hasn't been too much a pain in the rear for folks. Unfortunately its hard to gauge what exactly the effect was because creators tend to go utterly ballistic when the slightest thing goes wrong, making it impossible to tell what the actual problem is in between frothing, un-necessary screaming.
That said, I wanted to mention it here, in case people wanted to contact their banks to make sure there wasn't a red flag put up for any reason. I don't _think_ there's any major issue, but as stated, its hard to tell due to the, frankly, unhelpful hyperbole about the situation. Patreon could have handled this better.. or at least given a slight warning that, yes, they were switching payment processors to a UK company, and it might cause issues as banks would be cautious seeing sudden switches like that.
If there were problems, I'm sorry about that. Sadly its entirely on the whims of Patreon. I'd let folks know any updates of that nature ahead of time if I were notified of them myself.
That said, I'll be gearing up to do the final sketch on the list before it resets and I start doing a second drawing for the $10 tier folks, and I'm sketching away on a couple ideas now that should see daylight in the coming week.
Hope you all have a good weekend.
-T.J.
Comments
I wonder, sometimes, if they just don't think things through entirely. In this case I'm slightly lenient since it could have been a problem with their last payment processor that triggered the seemingly very sudden shift to one based in the U.K. But a few of their other ideas seem to just get dropped on everyone out of the blue and leave us wondering what to do. In this case, I literally had no clue anything was going on until I happened to read a third-hand twitter rant about 'something' going on with Patreon and declined cards. I had to check into it a bit and found out that they issued an apology and noted they'd get in contact with affected people. I only got a little annoyed since I like to try and break any 'site news' to you all if its going to have an effect on cards/fees/etc. But its been virtually impossible to do since creators just never seem to get warned of anything. Still, it seems that most folks have been told what was going on, so I hope all is well, even if it was a pain in the rear to have to get hold of banks to let them know the charge was fine. I'm grateful to those who stick with the sometimes wonky system.
Tim J.
2018-08-05 18:40:26 +0000 UTCBah, I'm so sorry about that. I'm glad it could be cleared up though. I really do wish they'd let creators know when there's a problem like this. Not that I could have done much more than get the word out there, but still, sorry that it happened. :/
Tim J.
2018-08-05 18:32:19 +0000 UTCPatreon really gets worse from day to day. I'm really sorry to all of you, who got hit by that especially you, Tim. I really hope that this won't go worse than it is already.
2018-08-05 07:50:05 +0000 UTCHappened to me. My card got flagged. but I called them and cleared it up.
MishaFox
2018-08-05 05:41:58 +0000 UTCOh man.. That's even worse. And yes, that sort of thing is exactly what will get a card flagged and halted (I've had it happen too in the distant past). It was hard to figure out what was going on since most people were just yelling that 'Patreon was doing something'. Sorry that it did happen though.. I can only hope that, somehow, the people working there start learning from some of these 'whoopses' they keep doing :/
Tim J.
2018-08-04 20:00:14 +0000 UTCThe problem (for me at least) is they charged me $1.00, then immediately refunded it, then charged the full amount. This is a classic fraud 'attack pattern', as you can go around with a set of potential credit card numbers, run 'em all for $1.00 each, and then try a larger charge on the ones that work. So my bank (as many others) flagged this as fraud and shut off my card. So I don't think the problem was the UK-based company, but Patreon's stupid way of handling the transition. Anyway, this is just an FYI, I certainly do not blame you at all :)
MountainGoat
2018-08-04 19:50:59 +0000 UTC
