Patreon added the declined feature to blackout patrons who didn't pay, but that's a reactive solution to frauds.
The only proper method I found is to charge upfront, that way the people pledging, have to pay a deposit before actually getting on your Patreon.
The problem is that upfront payment is only available with selected creators, which sucks given it's so essential.

Yea, I kinda figured the "Charge Upfront" would be the most tactical idea to avoid something like this happening. ;; Hopefully in the future I'd be offered the feature ;u;

and "Blackout?" Is that blocking them or something else?

No, when a payment is declined, the patron is unable to view the creator's content until sorting his payment method.

I think it'll be rolled out to everyone at some point; the charge upfront is still a beta feature.

I Don't use patreon so I Don't have any answers.. but I Just wanted to say.. making fraudulent pledges is a real dickish move.. I'm really sorry it happened to you ;w; Hopefully you'll be offered the charge upfront feature at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later ;w;

I got my first one now and it was slightly discouraging bc I thought I had reach a stretch xd, although ya should ask the Patreon staff about it. The problem is, Patreon has no way to be sure a card is a fraud or so until they try to make a payment the first of each month.

I think a good idea would be to display what youre expected to get and add the "new supporter" amount only after they were charged, but thats just me.

Its worth to mention that fraud pledges are expected to become common when a platform becomes super known (It happens with every single platform). That's why we should ask the Patreon staff about it, so they can put measures or whatever.

This just happened to me too.

Patreon are dicks as well for not allowing all users to charge up front. It would cut down a lot of this from happening.

Charge upfront is a feature that's in beta and eventually it'll be rolled out for everybody. https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-u.....w-do-I-get-it-
In any case, I read somewhere that the problems came from people charging upfront, not delivering anything and leaving.

Restrictions could be put on the feature so that only creators with a certain amount of time active could use the feature.

I find it hard to believe that's a widespread problem though, most patrons I see only support creators they've already been following for some time and already trust.

I actually just had the same issue. Eight new patrons, all 'fraudulent'. Would you mind giving me some details?
Just mostly, were all 15 of those 'fraud' pledges new? Were they all after October 1st?

Yea, they were all after October, and it was pretty constant, like a new one every few days. I should've known cause almost all the accounts looked suspisious in general.

The emails, the usernames, the icons, the fact that their account was created in October.

after October 1st***

Okay, to counteract fraud you'll need to just do it yourself. I've had a Patreon page nearly a year now.

Every time I get a new Patron I first check to see what icon they have. If its anything real life looking like someone's face or a flag or something similar with an Account Created date of that month they signed up it's pretty much fraud. It's just bots going through and adding your page.

Alternative, just send the new Patron a simple message if in doubt. "Hello, thank you for becoming my patron. If you are real please reply back within 2 days."

Block people up front and don't wait for Patreon to do it at the end of the month. you'll get your hopes up about having lots of potential extra earnings and disappoint yourself entirely on the 1st

that sounds like a really good idea actually! Thank you! QuQ Ill be sure to start doing that!

I've had to deal with this shit when I first started.

You mentioned a possible solution yourself; the "charge upfront" pretty much solved this problem for me. I highly suggest you go with this one. Trust me, for actual patrons it won't make a difference, but it will make it impossible for someone to make a fake account.

Now, if for any reason you don't wanna do that, you could also use dropbox or google drive to send your customers that months material AFTER their payments have been processed. I did this till Patreon let me charge upfront. It requires you to do some extra work, but it helps.

Other small things you can look into(that I'm sure someone in the comments already mentioned) is small details in these fake accounts. Normaly the emails are random letters and numbers, like nwr550@gmail.com(at least they were like this for me). They aren't people, but bots. They also never answer when you send them a message or have any profile picture. Some of them also pledge to a fuckton of artists. So whenever all of these details are in one account, I'd say it's ok to block.

Making money on the internet has these problems. The more you grow the more self entitled people try to take advantage of you. Just learn to walk around these problems and stay strong. You'll never be able to be fully protected from leaks though. That's something you'll have to learn to live with.

On a sidenote, you could(and I'm not sure if you already do) offer some sort of reward that cannot be "pirated", like streams, requests, custom works, etc. You might wanna take that into consideration too.

Hope this helps somehow.

That is some insanely helpful advice!! Thank you so much!! I really appreciate it! QuQ