Is there an issue going on with charges? I’m having an abnormal level of declined patrons this month (30% so far) and a lot of EU patrons are reporting their debit cards are being declined and locked by their banks as fraud. Several users complaining they had to go to their banks to get them unlocked.
Has something changed with how patrons are being charged?
I just dropped in to check if this was happening to anyone else. Over 20% of my patrons are declining too. I usually avoid checking Patreon on day 1 of pay processing because this seems to happen sometimes and it’s too stressful for me, lol.
I didn’t check if this month’s declines were mostly EU or international, but over the past months I’ve been losing a lot of international patrons over payment processing issues.
hey 
thanks for flagging this issue. let me look into this with the team - I’m not aware of anything changing at the moment but that does seem unusual. I’ll report back!
As another anecdotal example, another Patreon I’m part of has 11% declined pledges so far with about 50% processed, last month they had 0.5% declines total. Even if the rest process fine, that’s a significant increase in declined pledges.
I’m also experiences a significant number of declines. At least $100 has disappeare and I’m only 70% processed. Quite concerned by it.
Omg me too. Except it was even moreso last month! Missing over $200. Some of it has been recovered/processed a month later, thank god. I think it’s a coincidence but maybe it’s not?
I’m not sure if mine are mostly EU based (I suspec some are but others aren’t) but a lot of the people giving me declines are people I’ve not had problems with before. I hope it will be fixed ASAP because that’s quite a lot of money missing.
From one of my long-time patrons suddenly marked as “fraud”:
Obviously not fraudulent since it’s been going on for many months now, and he’s communicating with me.
25% declines over here. IT used to be no bigger than 1%.
Same - A long-time $50 patron who declined told me her payment should have gone through and still wouldn’t work when she retried it. So it doesn’t seem like something patrons can fix on their end.
More from the patron above:
Additional update from me too - the patron I mentioned before called her bank and was able to get the payment cleared. Another one did the same, and told me that his bank had flagged the payment as fraud. So, same issue as @Watsup . And yet another patron switched their payment to Paypal for it to go through. But this doesn’t seem to be affecting EU users specifically among my patrons. Many are in the US.
I also experienced higher than normal declines (7% declines this month; normally closer to 0.5%) and one of my Patrons said that his bank flagged the transaction as fraud (long-time Patron, and this has never happened before) and he had to call to get it to go through.
Now that the payments are processed I’m down $131 and 14 patrons declined of 93.
Using my maths skills (not too good so forgive me if I’m wrong) but I think that means I’m 10-15% down on expected money.
Edit: My maths skills are bad.
So I really don’t know what’s going on. Currently, this is my Exit Surveys page. I never had any 8-dollar pledge patrons at all, my highest tier costs 5 bucks a month. These amounts also don’t really deplete anything from my general counter (but it already has decreased plenty, because all declined credit card pledges temporarily decrease it)
So um, it’s kind of concerning because it all feels like it’s all kind of falling apart.
As an update, 2 people who asked their banks why this is happening informed me that “Patreon went from a US based company to a UK based company” and that is what set off the fraud alert. I’m not sure that is true, that’s just what their fraud departments are telling them.
And for some more anecdotal evidence, I got my receipt earlier today for the people I pledge to (saying it was a success). and Patreon didn’t charge me at all. So, uh. I’m sure i’m going to be hit with a fraud notice too.
Someone told me the same too o:
hey everyone - just writing in to say I’m here reading this and working on getting you info about what’s been happening. I’m so sorry for all the confusion and frustration it’s causing you and your patrons.
