“this ship/work of fiction could hypothetically hurt someone” is not an argument.
We don’t prohibit alcohol just because some people can hurt themselves/other people with it. People who can drink responsibly aren’t at fault for people who can’t.
You either believe in people to be personally responsible for themselves or you believe in a dystopia where all fiction is subject to censorship due to any possible cultural impact.
This person has scammed me and countless others by taking their money for commissions, disappearing for months, and then finally blocking everyone she promised commissions to and changing her URL (now haunted-marmalade but this is subject to change). I am not the only one she’s done this to.
It started back in December of 2017 when she opened commissions under the URL flying-shark-reactivated. And she probably got a lot of people to ask for them due to her unique art style and low prices, but a red-flag that I should have seen in hindsight was the fact that she asked for money up front, and also sent through paypal as a gift through her request as seen below.
For anyone who doesn’t know, when a commissioner asks you to send them payment as a gift to avoid fees, it also makes the payer unable to claim a refund if the commissioner decides to just run off with their money without giving the buyer anything.
But as an artist, I am always looking to support other artists when they open commissions and usually tip them if their art prices are low (lbr, so many artists on tumblr price their art way too low) And I thought our relationship was pretty professional, I even told her there was no rush and allowed her to take as much time as she needed due to her schoolwork. But as the months went on she stopped responding to my messages all together until she finally ended up blocking me with no word.
But this time I knew something was fishy, so I’ve even tried to e-mail her, and decided that hey if it was too much pressure for her to do my commission I would just ask for my money back, which is the first image you see in this post along with my note. I gave her plenty of chances to back out of a commitment she couldn’t hold up to. But no response, only a cancellation, a block, and a few days later she changed her URL and opened commissions again! All without fulfilling the commissions she already promised many others months before! Any attempt to contact her with other accounts asking for our money back results in an instant block. So BE WARNED if you see her taking commissions, IT IS A SCAM!
I’ll show you examples of her commission sheets (old and new) and artwork down below so you know what to look out for. She draws a lot of GTA V, furry art, and a series herself and her boyfriend as fursonas named Boo and Jam.
On her new account she is already receiving anons (btw, sending a death threat anon is just as shitty for an awful thing to do so don’t ever do that :I) which I am assuming is because people are VERY angry about having their money stolen, but she claims innocence and uses her age as an excuse. SHE IS 21, SHE IS AN ADULT and she is FLAT OUT STEALING FROM PEOPLE.
She says she wants to support herself with her art, but as someone who she took money from without getting any art in return, I find it hard to believe that’s really what she wants to do. She has gotten away with stealing from so many people for so long because 20-40 dollars is a low price for a commission, and it isn’t a huge loss for maybe one person but the fact that she scammed small amounts of money from a massive amount of people AND is PLANNING ON DOING IT AGAIN to a whole new wave of commissioners is what I can’t stand.
DO NOT COMMISSION ABIGAIL CAMPBELL OR HAUNTED-MARMALADE! YOU WILL HAVE YOUR MONEY STOLEN FROM YOU! PLEASE SIGNAL BOOST THIS SO OTHERS DON’T FALL VICTIM!
I’m reblogging this bc at this point, this post has a few hundred notes and most people seem to just reblog this post, or reblogging it and calling the artist a bitch. Now I have no idea weather these alligations are true or not, but I would like to call attention to the fact that the artist has tried to refute these alligations on their blog and posted screens of their PayPal to prove it. I admitably don’t understand those, but the artist also has some commissions posted on their blog that they seem to have done for people.
At this point I want to make it clear that I am not saying that I belive they’re innocent. Because I really don’t know either of these people and have never comissioned this artist. But keeping in mind that these kind of callout posts have been wrong and incredibly harmful in the past, and that these things are incredibly easy to manipulate, I want to encourage people to please not blindly reblog this, but do some research on it and come to your own conclusion.
And if that conclusion is that haunted Marmelade is probably a scammer because you have more expertise than me in finding this stuff out you can still just omit this addition to the post and reblog the version without it.
Hello! Locustpoof here, and I understand these kind of posts can be harmful, but I’ve tried to make any kind of contact with Haunted-Maramalade for several months (through paypal, email, and tumblr) and the last thing I was left to do was to just warn others not to fall into the same trap. I can’t even respond to her last response since she has me blocked, any any contact with other blogs just results in another block. (Here’s another person who it happened to, posting a link to their tweet with permission https://twitter.com/chubbytail/status/1006251783482740736 )
I saw her response to my post, and I honestly do not understand it either because I have never met her IRL unless she’s responding to whoever that anon was (because that wasn’t me). I’ve never spoken to her aggressively, not even when I requested my money back and I would have no reason to photoshop anything. And yeah, it’s confusing because she’s showing prices that are different than the amount of money I sent/requested back so I do think she is responding to someone else entirely.
But anyway, the whole point was just that other’s wouldn’t get scammed too. The commissions she reblogged were from two years ago, so the most recent ones I’ve seen her do were back in December just before she started opening them again in 2017.
She stole money from me and honestly I feel awful I even have to call an artist out like this… my last actual interaction with her was pleasant!
Those first few messages were in January (after commissioning her in December), and the last message was from last month (May). She didn’t respond and when I checked my messages a week ago I noticed I was inexplicably blocked by her!
I was confused, so I logged onto an old account and tried messaging her. She had opened for commissions so I tried starting a conversation under the pretense I wanted a commission. After a day of waiting I got impatient and admited I was lizardummy and asked for an explanation.
I tried to be as fair as possible, I know shit happens! But she blocked me AGAIN without comment and I was getting angry and desperate so I tried one last time to contact her on an older account I don’t use anymore.
I didn’t want to have my money just stolen, I wanted to give her an out she could use to explain herself and I would have taken even a half-assed excuse and let it go and even let her keep the money! She immediately blocked me…
I’m asking you to please be cautious with this artist, she’s stolen from me and others, and I do NOT want this to happen to anyone else anymore.
EDIT: I was able to recover Tumblr message screenshots
Abigail Campbell/flying-shark-reactivated/haunted-marmalade scammed $52 out of me and I’m furious. I don’t exactly make a ton of money super quickly, and I try to support so may great artists i see, but honestly this has just made me so much more paranoid. I can’t recover screenshots of messages I’ve sent on Tumblr messenger in attempt to contact her because she blocked me like the coward she is and I can’t get to the message chain. However, I do have the emails of what I’ve sent to her. My first one was what I wanted for my commissions, the second was me contacting her IN MARCH, after commissioning her in January and her lying to me saying it would be 3-4 weeks at most.
Here is a screenshot of the PayPal transaction when I sent her the money
Given I sent it as a gift , which was exactly what she wanted so she could get away with scamming me, I can’t get my money back, which is honestly all I want at this point. Sure, i can make more money, but the situation is so frustrating. Why does she feel the need to do this, when she has artistic ability,and seems to be relatively productive with it? Unacceptable. To those who commission and those possibly looking into commissioning her don’t fall for this. I’m super upset and I wish I could go back in time to stop myself. In the future, I will never send money as a gift again, I will only send if invoiced.
What kind of idiot… I mean, I can fully expect a corporate product to be here TODAY if I pay enough. But “made by hand”? Dude, that might take me a couple weeks. “And I want to pay the rate of the corporate mass-made thing with a discount.” You MUST be shitting me. “And I want it tomorrow.”
Even our printed stuff is made to order and by hand. Sublimation printing garments takes multiple days. THE INK HAS TO SET. Your garment is sewn to order by a human being. We don’t keep overstock.
As @dadhoc said: I love everyone, but your failure to plan is not my new emergency.
Tumblr is a horrible platform for artists/creators of any kind. It’s been like that for as long as I was on here, and long before that from what I’ve heard. But it’s gotten so much worse recently.
At first it was mostly unfair to new people who aren’t known yet, as the tag searches favour popularity over “freshness” of posts, and ‘newest’ area has always been neglected quite a bit. But that was something you learn to deal with relatively quickly. It’s a basic part of the struggle to climb through and get noticed by any community you decide to join. It’s rather fair compared to what is happening now.
Now, you can’treach people anymore, no matter how many followers you have. If you have a decent number, that makes things a bit more bearable because you already have an established audience. But if you’re new, or relatively unknown, you have only people who accidentally find you to rely on. The tags - main means to reach the audience - don’t work well. Dashboard - the only way to be seen - has a very bad algorithm, and no matter how much people tweak their settings, somehow still works against artists/creators. We are unseen. Suddenly you get maybe a third of notes you used to get. New people get none whatsoever.
And you might say ‘you shouldn’t be posting to get notes’ but who re you kidding, we create to share our interests and show people what we made and are proud of! The notes tell us we indeed did good, and we maybe made someone’s day a little better with our work, and we get a positive response in return, making us happy. Everybody wins! But without being seen? Well, be it new, or just seeing a drop in notes, we feel discouraged.
“Have I gotten worse?” “Am I really a bad artist/creator?” “Should I even bother?” All of these doubts start arising, and we stop wanting to create. But here’s the thing.
It’s not that we’re bad, nor do people ignore us.
It’s the shitty algorithm that hides us from everyone. And I doubt they’ll care to fix this.
So, share each other’s work. Reblog your favourite creators. Reblog NEW creators. Check their blogs for new content every now and then. Leave a positive message in each other’s ask boxes every once in a while.
You’ll make their day. You’ll give them a reason to keep creating.
Because if tumblr won’t help, we only have each other to look out for.
shipping a rarepair with little to no content is torture, i totally agree, but there’s a special kind of hell called “popular pairing with thousands of fics on ao3 but 90% of them are A/B/O mpreg dubcon slave/master harry potter!au that i wouldn’t read if you put a gun to my head” and i’m living in it