Announcement
Hi all,
Mods Sero (Zoe) and Mina (Ev) here with an update on the state of Sixth Wheel Zine and recent information that has come to light regarding Head Mod Jirou’s (Sydnee) mishandling of zine finances. We’d like to thank you all again for your support of the zine and your patience during shipping/fulfillment. Given recent events, we feel it is our responsibility to elaborate on some things that have occurred behind the scenes. Shipping Issues
During the shipping period, Zoe and Ev had noticed that the head mod Sydnee was struggling with fulfilling some obligations, primarily shipping. Though we made many offers to help her fulfill shipping responsibilities (such as fixing shipstation issues), Sydnee turned us down, assured us that she had the situation under control, and remained tight-lipped about information we needed in order to update our contributors. It was only with a lot of pressure from Zoe that shipments went out to contributors, and both Ev and Zoe needed to provide money to pay the costs of some shipments, according to Sydnee — but our access to various accounts was greatly restricted. Some of this was due to privacy/inability to share access (i.e. the bank account that Stripe deposited money into), as well as Sydnee’s unwillingness to give up control.
The majority of the remnants sales were confirmed to have been shipped out on Halloween and then the rest was confirmed to have been shipped on Monday, November 4th.
Finances
With shipments all fulfilled, on November 4th, Zoe began tracking down payments, receipts, and other zine costs, and she realized that numbers weren’t adding up. After all fees, refunds, and zine expenses were calculated, we discovered that about 80% of the zine’s profit was missing.
On Wednesday, Nov 6th, Sydnee finally came clean to Zoe and Ev. Without their knowledge Sydnee had been dipping into the zine’s profits for her own bills. Sydnee, as of right now, does not have the money to pay back the missing amount. She says that her father will help her pay this deficit back at a rate of $200 a week. Due to this, it will require about 10 weeks for the deficit to be paid back. Sydnee then offered a few payment plans and a promise to keep contributors updated over the course of the 10 weeks she was returning the funds.
However, there remains an issue with Sydnee’s ability to be contacted. Since deleting her Tumblr account nearly a year ago, the main ways of contacting her have been through her accounts on Twitter and Discord. She deleted her Twitter accounts on Thursday, November 7th.
Zoe and Ev gave Sydnee a deadline to explain the situation to the contributors (Nov 11). After making an announcement in the zine’s Discord server and requesting that everyone take 24 hours to cool down, Sydnee logged off. She returned the morning of Nov 12th to say that since no one had any questions for her, she had transferred ownership of the server to Zoe. She then left the server.
Mods are still in contact with her through Discord and will follow up every week about her weekly $200 payments, but it remains that Sydnee has closed down as many avenues to contact her as possible and that there’s only one reliable way left.
Mods will pay contributors their shares in full as they’re able, based on the order of which contributors need their money asap vs those who don’t mind to wait. At this point in time, we have to hope that she will remain committed to returning what she owes.
Thank you again.
