nukepone:

loneless-nsfw:

It’s time for me to call out Icy Breeze. I’ve been sitting on this topic for way too long and without warning other people about him the situation doesn’t better. Some of you will know what I’m talking about, but for the rest I will tell you the story:

For me it all started last October, when Icy Breeze commissioned me. It was the time when I raised my prices and for him, because it just happened while we were talking, I gave a discount. So instead of the new $55 he just needed to pay $44. It all went like butter, we talked out the details and the commission was done not much later. Little did I know that 3 months later I get to deal with him again.
On February 6 PayPal opened a case of an “Unauthorized Transaction” in the amount of $41.98. I saw the case 10 days later (because I didn’t take commissions at that time I didn’t need to check PayPal that often). Everyone here using PayPal will know they don’t give you much more hints, so for two hours I was going on trying to figure out who, for what and why someone chargeback-ed on me, and I found out it was Icy’s commission, minus the fees, his credit card company wanted back from me.
I went to talk to Icy about this and apparently many more artists had this problem with him.
After days of contacting multiple artists and talking with them about this, we found out was this the second time in those 3 months: there were 2 waves with each 10-15 victims. But it wasn’t the only disgusting thing:
Throughout the days and weeks of dealing with this we found Icy had a different excuse every time you asked him. On Tumblr he posted that his credit card got stolen, he “expected a call or some kind of paperwork so [he] can say what were [his] payments and what were not but unfortunately that didn’t happen.”, which is the dumbest excuse, if he doesn’t have the most retarded credit card company ever, but on he went with more and more excuses. The latest I can think of is “My card didn’t get stolen. I had switched the numbers and my card company marked that as me claiming fraud even though I told them it wasn’t”, which is even worse, not only because he completely turns around from the public post he made, but also that’s absolutely not how credit cards work.
Obviously we, the artists, all called PayPal to try and get things sorted out. Some people like @whisperfoot-nsfw got their money back, but others like me did not, with the explanation that digital goods are lacking seller protection. All I could get refunded were the $2.02 PayPal fees. In the meanwhile Icy kept on shitting on our faces, still trying to keep his facade up, saying things like “I’ve done everything to speed up the process. […] The bank has charged me back for the full amount and sent the money back to paypal but it can take up to 40 or so days from now to process.”, which was the last bit we ever exchanged in a conversation, which was on February 21.
For some of the artists who did get their money back the story didn’t end there. Whisperfoot’s, Celestia bless you, commission for Icy was much more expensive than mine. Little later after he got his money back, he was charged back by PayPal again, but with an extra big fee of some sort, losing a total of $114 in the process. I don’t know of any other cases like Whisper’s, and it is assumed half the artists got their money back from PayPal now. But Whisper, nor I, and even less many others have.
This is the story up to now. Not much has changed since then, which now is 4 weeks ago.

With this post I wanted to raise awareness that there are people like this and we artists have to deal with this all the time; it’s part of the bad things about freelancing and taking commissions.
There is currently another well known commissioner going round fucking artists over, some know him by the name Icy Breeze 2.0, but that is a topic for another post.

TL;DR and Fazit:
Icy Breeze is a thief and liar. Never ever take commissions from him again!

If you want to see screenshots of conversations, just ask. I would also like to refer you to a blog post by Ylpmis showing a screenshot of Icy’s original blog post with the “my credit card got stolen” statements: https://simplybackwards.tumblr.com/post/170639336739/artistfandom-beware-icy-breezelightning

Please spread the message. If you want to help us, please just be honest and don’t spend money you don’t have.

Icy Breeze is also a piece of shit.