More patreon fuckery

Good

I'm sorry. At the moment, Patreon owns the space and is the least shady by a wide margin. Even if the kickstarter version ever opens to the general public I may not be able to get on it...

Jackie Wohlenhaus

Mine did not expire, I have money in the bank and I do not trust Paypal, who already burned me on fraud once, and this really annoyed me. *And* my card was marked for possible fraud because of this foolishness.

Alex

Someone mentioned that Patreon changed banks from teh US to a UK bank, and that triggered a lot of rejections, too. Mine worked, though.

Noise

I came into work yesterday to over two thousand emails. THANK YOU ETSY! ... >_o

When I see a huge pile of work, I just tell myself: "Think of it as job security..."

Matthew Speidel

Some of it was old cards hitting expiration dates, because even when you keep the same card number Patreon doesn't let you update the expiration when you get a new card. That's what Bank of America told me this morning when I called anyway. Should be working now though, only took a few minutes to clear up. Of course, ~5 min x 600.000 transactions... I feel bad for the call centers.

Benjamin Hower

Last month it was GoFundMe. People were going through the rigamarole of signing in and giving it their credit card number, then it would chew for a minute and say, <i>"Nsah, I don't think so."</i> I called their no-help line, and the bimbo on the other end swore up and down I was the only person in the <i>entire world</i> having that problem. Meanwhile, the flame messages on their forum were piling up...

Perfesser Bear

Some banks don't allow banks outside the US to process payments. It triggers a fraud stop. How we figured this out was that I called a business owner who had a declined charge using Etsy what she was seeing, and the charge had come from a Russian processor (a certified one, but still outside the US). I then saw that Patreon charges are coming from UK. And the declined Kickstarter/Backerkit are coming from Canada. So ACI Worldwide believes that's part of the problem.

Maybe someone used huge "pledges" to fake Patreon accounts from hacked credit cards to siphon money out of victims' accounts? Or something?

Matthew Speidel

The issue I got was from my bank, not from Patreon. Once I called them and explained that it was legit, they unblocked my credit card and I only had to hit "retry" to put my Patreon pledges through.

Matthew Speidel

And to some degree, this also weighs in - since Kickstarter did the exact same cross-over two days ago to a Canadian bank: "The reason that it's declining is because the charge is now coming from the United Kingdom, whereas previously it wasn't. This info should've been mentioned up front to people cause my bank blocks all international transactions unless you call in advance to let them know about it." My company just verified that the effected users in Etsy are also having the same issue because the core company moved payments out of Russia. Oi vey, these companies should know banking 101 by now.

That's a very nice at to handle the annoyance. I hope the rest of the people affected will feel the same way.

Jackie Wohlenhaus

Also, awesome of you to feel responsibility, but we just want to make sure that you get your money! And in case the money doesn't say it, thank you for making awesome art for us to enjoy and laugh to. I hope you can keep it going and manage to live well.

That could be, but then it wouldn't be on multiple web services. Patreon uses a payment processor's software like everyone else on the web.

I managed to add a new card, transfer the account, delete the original card, re add it, transfer the account BACK, then delete the new card, I think it worked, but I will be on the look out for a failure next month.

Well, I noted that the list of customer affected by the processor's problem included Patreon. I also saw we had a problem over in Kickstarter today where a few projects went to collection and hit a fraud stop that bounced a few people. Backerkit just had the same issue - a message about a detected fraud activity stopped payments.

Other creators have mentioned a possible switch to a foreign bank on Patreon's part, which may have prompted fraud protection on patrons' cards. PayPal users so far unaffected, I believe international credit patrons may not have issues either.

Emanuele Barone

No worries. Either Patreon will tell you or you can find the info tomorrow somewhere.

By all means, do go on, but don't reveal anything that could get you fired.

Jackie Wohlenhaus

I can answer this, since I work for one of the processors for Patreon. It's not just Patreon where this is happening. Due to a Fraud Detection and Prediction error in the software, Kickstarter, PayPal, Etsy and a few other web companies aside from Patreon declined over 600k transactions. This is the host company's issue based on the backend Tandem process. We received over 9k declines ourselves.