Blitzdrachin - Artists Beware (Archive)

Who: Blitzdrachin Where: https://www.patreon.com/blitzdrachin https://www.blitzdrachin.club/ https://www.furaffinity.net/user/blitzdrachin/

What: Patreon pledge of $10, granting access to all current and previous art on her website at original resolution. When/Explain/Proof: (It's a bit of a long story, so I'll put the whole thing here and timestamp each event, and put the proof alongside it. TL;DR at the bottom.)

May 16th

8:29PM -

Registered an account at https://www.blitzdrachin.club/

8:59PM — 9:02PM -

I decided create a Patreon account and to pledge $10 to her Patreon to unlock all of her current and previous works. I then signed in to her website using my new Patreon account, which inadvertently created a second account on her website.

9:49PM -

Less than an hour later, I received an email informing me that Blitzdrachin has blocked me from Patreon and I have been unpledged. Despite apparently no longer being pledged, no refund was given. My accounts were deleted from her website and my access to the content I paid for had been revoked. No explanation was was given and there was no attempt to contact me.

Emails with events and their timestamps: https://imgur.com/a/18al5ri

~10:25PM -

I told some people about what happened and asked for advice or clues as to why she did this. A f riend of mine came on and offered to relay my messages to her through a friend of his friend (not a reliable way of communicating, but she wasn't going to talk to me directly). You can read the conversation here:

https://imgur.com/XIASgeJ

https://imgur.com/Q1rv2uA

~12:20AM -

I took my friend's advice and reached out to her on FA, politely requesting a refund and acknowledging that she's busy and has the right to not trust whomever she wants. About an hour later, she replied to me, accusing me of being someone on an unspecified forum and claiming that I had violated her website's TOS. She made no mention of my money and offered nothing as to what I should do next. By the time I tried replying to her, she'd already blocked me on FA. It seemed clear by that point that she has no intention of returning my money or offering any sort of explanation.

Our messages: https://imgur.com/a/PcdkgVX

The screenshot she provided: https://imgur.com/aYDmVyU

The block message I received: https://imgur.com/bVml65w

May 17th

7:41AM - 3:41PM

I wasted a bunch of time trying to get Patreon refund me or at least take action about what happened. Of course, they weren't helpful in the slightest.

Screencaps: https://imgur.com/i5XXK8F https://imgur.com/T2p2OR4 https://imgur.com/3fSvS1j

And then I found something in one of their support articles that practically states that it's acceptable for creators to accept money and never deliver on their promised reward.

https://imgur.com/Ca0JIlz

So after reading that, I gave up on going through hoops with customer support and instead filled a chargeback through Paypal. Still waiting on the results for that.

Sometime after 9:50PM -

My friend and a few other helpful people looked into the whole "this screenshot with a link proves you're leaking my art" thing that Blitzdrachin sent me, and a couple of interesting things were discovered:

1. The url in that screenshot was a link to one of Blitzdrachin's free images and wouldn't have been a violation of her TOS in the first place.

https://www.blitzdrachin.club/img/5-30-0-1521952695855.png

https://www.blitzdrachin.club/#/gallery/t5/-arcanine-x-braizen

2. The only possible identifier in that URL would be the timestamp, so we decoded the timestamp to see what date it'd give. The date given was March 25th, which is nearly 2 months before I created my account. https://imgur.com/y8qAKPA

It wasn't even until the end of April that I'd visited her site for the very first time. https://imgur.com/T2kRBew

TL;DR

I pledged $10 to Blitzdrachin on Patreon for full access to her website. She blocked me from Patreon and deleted my accounts from her website 40 minutes later without reason. I later managed to indirectly contact with her on Discord, where she said she blocked me because I'd made 2 accounts on her website (which I did, accidentally), and that apparently meant I was leaking her art.

I then contacted her on FA asking for a refund, to which she responded by accusing me of breaking her TOS and linking a screenshot of a random forum post of som eone posting a URL as "proof" and then blocking me from all platforms, with no mention of a refund. Patreon naturally took no action.

It was later found out that the url in the 'proof' screenshot she sent me was a link to one of her free images, and the timestamp in the url (the only thing that could 'identify' someone, as she put it) was dated for March 25th, 2 months before I created my account. So it wasn't even a reasonable mistake, she outright lied to cover her ass and not have to give a refund or admit she did something wrong.