I don't see this hack raking a lot of dollaroos. "stealing" someone's account would be far more dangerous. That said I'm surprised that Patreon will just let people recycle accounts like this without even a second step.
This is no different than DNS parking after a domain fell off the wagon, only with direct revenues.
I’m not advocating this. Doing this was wrong, and it’s not some black hat exploit. It was a scam; pretending to be someone to make money off of an unwitting victim.
For some time the most well known youtubers would receive spam replies on all of their tweets with links to counterfeit merch sites.
If you search for the the top handful of YT creator names on Amazon or eBay you’ll find loads of bootleg merch (sometimes with hundreds of reviews!)
however, what you are doing is illegal...
Patreon, and ANY website that has user's profiles as permalinks, should reserve ANY account name that has been deleted to prevent squatting.
I'm not sure how this works with the right to be forgotten laws though; I have a gut feeling that you can have your profile deleted and the leftover URLs and permalinks just go to 404 or other kinds of placeholders.
Ironically this is also a bit of an entrepreneurial advantage. A trained corporate management drone will be aware of all the bad things that can happen and has been paper trained by lawyers to be frightened of doing anything illegal. The sweet spot is when it's something that's just slightly illegal or just a matter of civil law, but the danger zone is in something like this which is just fraud.
I am just saying that in security, while it can be very difficult to always find where the line between ethical and unethical conduct is; and what will get a company to pay attention to an issue without getting yourself arrested;
What I AM saying is that this person blew so far past that line that I wonder if they are even aware that one exists. All without even considering that, maybe, "that time last week when I committed wire fraud" probably isn't the best topic for a blog post.
Do I think that the author was acting maliciously or in bad faith? No. But the US justice system has a really nasty habit of not taking facts like these into account; as Aaron Swartz tragically learned.
Tl;dr "it's just a prank, bro" is not an effective legal defense, and prosecutors fucking LOVE convicting hackers.
Why fraud? If we are talking about criminal law, the requirements to convict a person are strict. In this case the author has not claimed neither on Patreon or YouTube to be someone he is not. He has not falsified any data/documents and has not stolen any account, since the one he claimed was available.
Sketchy? No doubts. Fraud? Doesn't seem like it at all.
I am not a lawyer, but using someone else picture and name sounds a bit of "claiming someone you're not" to me :)
* The patreon page was misleading (this post shows it was, including the use of old links and imagery to show association to a YouTube channel which was false)
* The person making it knows it might be misleading (they did - they said so in this post)
* The intention was to make a gain in money for themselves, others or to cause a loss to someone else. This includes situations where the gain in money is only temporary (again, technically yes.)
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35/pdfs/ukpga_2006...
I'm not saying they should be charged with it as clearly they didn't mean to cause harm and were doing it to raise awareness, but it does seem to fit the definition.
This world still be black hat (or arguably grey hat)...
White hat would have been realizing the possible problem and informing the company without actually making the account (or, with only making the account or prove the link, but not taking money from anyone)
You could possibly argue that if the author "cheated himself" only, that's okay... E.g. paid themselves through patreon... Assuming the author eats the cost difference and doesn't refund.
The author actually defrauded unaware visitors, intentionally, he has caused harm to them, patreon (financially or good will/name), and the money transfer networks; this is at a minimum grey hat... Sure, the end user donating was made whole, but other business entities were harmed... Someone eats that transaction fee.
If I was a potential customer looking into said business and found this post I would be very offput by the lack of morals. The strongest condemnation we receive for literal theft is they "didn't want to", the author barely even seems to understand why their behavior is immoral.
The author makes no mention of warning Patreon about this weakness, unless you're counting this blog post as the warning.
They clearly attempted to impersonate the original owner of the page, using a description and artwork suggesting they were the original owner.
The second to last paragraph features the author fantasizing about how much money they could make by defrauding people. Quote: "This plan could be pretty profitable!"
Like yeah, in the end they took down the page and refunded the patron. But the author made the wrong choice at essentially every step prior to that moment.
The author didn't just "spot a weakness in patreon", they attempted to (and managed to) commit wire fraud. The fact they had little success and later returned what they stole is relatively little consolation.
If a "street magician" randomly picks my pocket out of the blue, you can bet I consider that theft, even if they give it back afterwards. They'd better get my consent to do anything with my person or my property.
So I'll chip in that for basic theft, one of the core elements is intent to permanently deprive the original owner. So if someone steals money, changes their mind, and then returns it, that's still theft. And taking money to spend, with a promise of returning money later, still counts as theft. But if the intent all along was to return it the next day, stored safely the entire time, that's not theft.
Obviously intent is hard to prove, so don't try to pull that off without a lot of evidence and/or a very understanding target.
Legally, this isn't even remotely true.
If you deprive someone of their legal possessions without permission, even with intent to return it later, you are guilty of theft.
There is no loophole that allows you to temporarily steal things as long as you intend to return them.
Intent only comes into play if the person had no intention of depriving the other person. An example would be if you accidentally pick up someone else's jacket because you thought it was yours.
The difference isn't a loophole.
www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-defense/criminal-offense/what-difference-between-joyriding-stealing-a-ca r
Fraud is deception with the intent of personal gain.
He wrote and published an entire blog article entitled "How I exploited existing youtube videos with a fake Patreon profile" in which he describes how he registered a Patreon account with the expectation of deceiving users into sending him money.
There is no loophole that allows people to temporarily steal things as long as they kindly return them later.
See the model penal code[1] "(1) "deprive" means: (a) to withhold property of another permanently or for so extended a period as to appropriate a major portion of its economic value, or with intent to restore only upon payment of reward or other compensation"
See [2] which mentions the "permanent" requirement three times.
[1] https://archive.org/details/ModelPenalCode_ALI/page/n207/mod...
[2] https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-charges/theft-over...
To clarify, most jurisdictions have definitions of theft that will be true even if you only deprive the person of their property for a short period of time:
> Today, many states have extended the definition of theft to include depriving the owner of the property even for a short period of time, thus rendering unauthorized borrowing as theft.
From https://lawshelf.com/shortvideoscontentview/theft-crimes-a-s...
So yes, maybe there is some jurisdiction somewhere that wouldn’t define unauthorized borrowing as theft, but chances are good that if you borrow something without authorization, you can be guilty of theft (among other things) in most jurisdictions.
Theft generally (specific statutes may vary!) requires intent to permanently deprive; if you don’t have that, its not theft.
It may be another crime, and its almost certainly the tort of trespass to chattels, so its not “allowed”.