I hate complaining publicly, it feels cowardly. I avoid it at all costs, but I guess I need some help, and would like what happened to me to not happen to anyone else. I've been involved with a very difficult situation for a long time.

TL;DR: I've been scammed out of $2,000 for a fursuit I've been promised for nearly 5 years and don't really know what to do now. Everything I am writing here has to remain factual if it doesn't want to sound like I'm shit smearing this person. They have not been active and have either disappeared or have switched to another alternate. However, my experience with them keeps me suspended in disbelief. My money has been stolen, bottom line.

In the summer of 2018, I got in contact with a suit maker,  catalystcustoms . We worked out a solid plan of a wolf that would be completed within a year or so. They promised a lot of great things like digigrade, moving jaw, magnet expressions, the sort. I worked out a payment plan with them and payed them in $500 increments for a few months until it was payed off. Stupidly, I decided to cut them a break and payed via PayPal's gift function to help them avoid any fees. It was the least I could do, yeah?

I saw legitimate progress after sending a DTD to them, they had the materials, the head carved, everything. It was very promising and convincing that I'd even have a suit by 2020. Of Course by then, COVID had hit, so I kept giving them more and more time. I understood this wasn't going to happen as quickly as I'd like. But then they started to take several months at a time to respond, making me believe more than once I'd been played.

So now here we are, 5 years later. They've had plenty of excuses to give me such as personal hardships, evacuating a hurricane, etc. Understandable stuff. The last time I spoke to them was March of 2022 where I was promised it would be completed two months ago and have refused to respond to me. When I did get THAT response, it was because I found one of their older accounts on Etsy or something and announced I was willing to take this public if there wasn't a deal to be made.

I've been refused a refund, I've been refused the current progress of the suit, I have been refused their real name when I was considering taking legal action. I'm seriously out of options here. I hate to call it a scam when they were seriously putting in effort sometimes, but the last I've seen was a tail and incomplete head. I think the paws were also finished, can't prove this, but those may have been sold off. Hell, they may have run with my money and sold the suit! So, if you're out there, I'm not here to spread libel. I'm not here to take legal action. I just hope that this review of your practices are loud and clear considering I was a paying customer for an amount of money that could have covered rent, living expenses, etc. I understand this suit cost money to build, I know the materials cut profits, I understand what it's like to run a business with many customers, but this is unacceptable. At the end of the day, the only thing I've received was a profile picture they commissioned someone else to complete.

My advice? Learn from my mistakes. I wanted to give a small suit maker a chance with an expensive, long term project. It really doesn't matter since they've been inactive for a year, but to anyone considering suit makers, stay away from them. Get it in writing, even if it's just a business name, I recommend addresses or P.O. boxes their business intends to run out of. Don't do what I did and gift a business owner money, that's all on me I guess.

I reached out to someone who commissioned them a year ago or so for some paws I think it was and they let me know how much of a struggle it was to even get those. To anyone who might have some advice here, anything is appreciated. If this sounds like a one sided story, I've saved every chat I've had with them for a reason, anyone can take a look at what I've been dealing with throughout FurAffininty, Instagram, and Twitter. I was being as patient as I could be for years, now I'm done. I have never met someone who has crossed their t's and dotted their i's and have ridden my excessive patience of this situation to such a bitter end. I seriously hope that they either give me my money back, or never attempt to do this to someone again. $2,000 is a lot of money. Perhaps not over the course of such a long period of time now, but it sucks.