Patreon Pledging issues? Read this!
Quick tl;dr: You’re possibly having issues due to your bank marking Patreon as a fraudulent charge, or you’re using a gift/pre-paid card, or you’re using American Express cards directly instead of through PayPal or something else similar.
So Patreon, sometime last month, moved most of their processing stuff to the UK to allow us to still have adult content on the site.
In doing so though, it caused a large amount of problems with people pledging from countries outside of the UK (and even some in it).
Most of those problems were fixed last month, but for some people, those problems still exist, or for new pledgers this month, those problems have popped up for the first time.
Often this will result in you not getting charged by Patreon and being marked as “fraudulent” or getting a call from your bank about “fraudulent charges” from Patreon, or something else that generally prevents you from pledging to a Patreon account.
The following three issues are the possible culprits regarding your inability to pledge, from most likely to least likely.
POSSIBILITY #1: Your bank, seeing a charge from somewhere all the way in the UK when you don’t live in the UK (or if you’re in the UK, your bank being used to Patreon charging to a US location) sees this as fraudulent.
SOLUTION: You’ll need to call up your bank or go there in person to let them know that Patreon isn’t a fraud website and you authorized these charges. After the first time you do this, this shouldn’t need to be done again.
POSSIBILITY #2: You’re using a pre-paid card of some kind, or a gift card to pay.
SOLUTION: In doing this switch to the UK banks, Patreon no longer can accept pre-paid or gift cards. You’ll have to use a credit or debit card tied to a bank account, either through PayPal or directly linking it to Patreon.
POSSIBILITY #3: You’re using an American Express card directly on Patreon, instead of using it through PayPal.
SOLUTION: This isn’t a problem for everyone, but people in some regions have reported having issues with American Express cards being used directly on Patreon, instead of using PayPal to pay and having your AmEx card be the card in use on the PayPal account.
If none of the above are working, I would suggest you contact Patreon directly at https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=70716 and let them know your issues; they may be able to help.
I’d like to reiterate that Patreon didn’t move banks to the UK arbitrarily; they did it because, as they’ve said publicly, they needed to do this to appease outside powers (Payment providers, and no, I don’t mean PayPal) when it came to having adult content on Patreon.
If they didn’t do this, we likely would have ended up without being able to charge ANYONE for adult content on Patreon.
Lastly, If anything ever were to happen to adult content on Patreon where it would completely become banned on the platform (which I don’t think it would, given that Patreon has said publicly repeatedly how dedicated they are to keeping adult content on the platform), I’d like to make sure everyone knows that development on the games would not stop and we would still be dedicated to finishing them.
We would need to find alternative funding methods though and as such development would likely slow as we had to dedicate time to other work that was paying our bills/rent while we worked on the games, but development would not stop.
Thanks again for reading this, and hopefully this helps you out!
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