Hey!
I am fairly new here. I’ve been reading some of the forum postings, but I feel like I am just missing something. How do you know who to ban?
What data do you look at?
What process do you follow to determine if they are real or fake?
What other information can you share about how you prevent people from stealing your work?
I appreciate any advice, links, or information my fellow creators can provide.
Thank you!
To ban, you go to your patron list
Left sidebar > patrons > “View all current patrons” button > and then you find whom you want to ban, and there’s two ways to ban.
check the box on the left of their name and at the top the ban option will show up (can only do this with one person checked. If you check more than once you cannot mass ban and the option will dissapear. Which imo is a pain.)
Click their name and go to their page. Under their user information there will be a button/icon for more options and on will be to block them.
As for figuring out who to block, its different for everyone and getting harder. Usually its a new account, weird names, icons that don’t match up to their names, weird businesses, etc. I make sure i go and check all of their accounts to see if they have any successful pledges.
Lots of people also send notes and give people 24-48 hours to respond to confirm they are real and then they remove them. The issue is that if they are taking content, they’ve done it within minutes of pledging, likely. (most are bots these days.)
To prevent people from stealing my work, i post low res in the blog and private message all paid patrons the finished/high res content. NOW, I’m cropping the low res versions and DMing people the full previews because there’s a site that is stealing my private content, including low res, and i’ve just hit the point where my patrons and I agree that since early access is a big part of their rewards, I’m going to put extra effort into keeping those things private just to them.
Hopefully that helps!
Thanks Temrin!
These are exactly some of my concerns. I have a couple of questions. These may actually be better directed towards Patreon support though.
So when I look at my list of current patrons, as you suggested, quite a few have their status marked as “fraud”. Are those for sure fraudulent accounts that should be blocked immediately?
Similarly, I find that if I right click in that same list on some of the accounts that I think are suspect and then choose “Open in a New Window”, then they’re patreon site has been removed when it attempt to open their profile. Are these also obviously false accounts that should be immediately blocked?
Thank you for any advice you might have! 
As far as i know, yes. It will say fraud if they gave fraudulent payment information. There is a difference with this and “declined” - Declined means their info was supposedly correct but there might be something else that happened. (snafu with the bank, maybe their card expired but was previously correct, etc.)
Ah, yeah i brought this up in another forum thread, accounts that have found to be fraud and removed/closed for breaking patreon TOS, don’t automatically get removed from your account. the tech team seems to be looking into it if memory serves so we will just have to wait and see how this gets handled. Logically, they should be removed from all lists for people they pledged to but for now you will have to manually remove them if you don’t like them being on your list. (I don’t know if their account has been closed and they cannot access it, but i assume so? This would be a support team question.)
Happy to help
Understood!
Also, based on Carla’s assistance, the support team has already responded and did clarify that profiles which come up as “this site has been removed” were already found to be fraudulent and removed accordingly.
Oh good! I pointed out the data you had shared so glad they got back to you so quickly!