So according to Patreon, https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205032045-What-is-Patreon-s-refund-policy- Patreon can’t initiate refunds on the behalf of backers, and thus the creators themselves have to initiate the refunds.
Now, up until recently, I was checking my refunds every so often and this seemed to be the case.
However, a few people told me they were getting refunds done on their pledges without their consent, and so I checked mine, and sure enough, there’s lots of refunds I didn’t consent to, starting in 2018, with the bulk of them in August.
Some of the people are refunding months or years worth of charges, so even though the refund date is in August, they’re refunding charges back as far as 2017, and multiple ones of them.
On top of that, one guy refunded in 2018 for pledges in 2016, and when I go to check the Patreon Relationship Manager to see what their account info is using the email listed on the refund, no account comes up, and when I check my email records for emailing them rewards, there’s no emails I’ve ever sent to this person either.
So there’s definitely some weird stuff going on here.
Some of these refunds are for $50+ or more, so yeah, if Patreon has changed policies on this and backers can initiate refunds (as it seems to be happening to quite a few people), it’d be good if the ToS got updated, and if not, and this is a glitch happening to a lot of people, I figured I’d bring it to your attention.