You probably remember that in July we’ve got an incredible flow of donations, which in turn triggered the start of our work on Episode 3 of Pepper&Carrot Motion Comic.
I have put those donations into producing animatic and soundtrack, which you can see published in this post.
After the work on animatic was completed and money were paid to all everyone who did that work, some unpleasant event has happened.
I started receiving messages from Gumroad platform (the one, through which donations were coming), informing me that many of transactions made in July were identified as fraudlent transactions.
It looks like someone has used stolen card numbers to make a massive donations to our project.
This is quite an unpleasant situation, first place because of ethical reasons.
And secondly, as result of canceled transactions, I’ve got a negative balance at our Gumroad account, which I should eventually to compensate.
It is impossible to contact person who did that, as the email addresses used for purchase appeared to be invalid.
I repeat, that this is quite an unpleasant situation and I just want to say to whoever did that – please do not do that again. We do not need that kind of funding.
UPDATE: See my second post about this story.
6 Responses
It’s extremely sad to see that you were victim of such behaviour 🙁
Let’s hope this will never happen again in the future.
It’s even worse – I have examined other transactions made in July and they look very similar to those identified as fraudulent. I feel not comfortable with that, as I do not want my projects funded that way.
After thinking on this I came up with the following plan: refund all July transactions (I can do that from Gumroad’s dashboard) and then post email update to all July customers explaining the situation. In email I can say that if they still want to support the production of new episode they can do that through OpenCollective page (https://opencollective.com/morevnaproject/contribute/pepper-and-carrot-motion-comic-19435). That way all fraud victims will get their money back and if there are legit donors, then they will know how to contribute.
On the other hand, this will increase debt in my Gumroad account, so I think it worth to contact Gumroad staff first…
It sounds like a solid plan. Showing that you err on the safest side and still offering solutions to get legit contributions.
Asking Gumroad for some tolerance on the refund delay may hopefully lead to a positive balance before you need to personally compensate the fraud loss 🤞
We support you from the bottom of our hearts.
Got a response from Gumroad. I discussed the situation with Gumroad’s owner and he assured me that my account can sit with negative balance until I have opportunity to get it covered. Support team examined remaining transactions and confirmed them as fraudulent. Issued a refund for all them, it’s a bit more than $500 debt on my balance now. In any case I feel better, than making this project with stolen money! ^__^