Fern
Hello everyone, today there aren’t any good news sadly, as we’re here to warn you about a single individual that roamed the Vilous chats and other communities’ chats as well for some time before we learned the truth about him. Fernand (@FernardGvinn) as most of you know him, has scammed both artist and normal people since his arrival in the community. This is not a surprising behavior as he is well known in the Russian artist community to have done the exact same thing a few years ago. After getting kicked out of that community, he decided to widen his horizons and tried to scam us. We’re afraid to announce that at some point he did succeed.
He opened a «studio» supposed to make communication and commissions easier between Russian artists and international customers. To do so, he took a part of the commission price for himself, which is normal as he was the only link between those artists and customers, the only problem is that the artists never knew what the exact amount of money they would get from a comm was, and more, they never knew what the amount Fern took was.
In general services like those can go from a few percents to a fifth of the max price. In Fern’s case, it went as high as 50%, without the artist ever knowing they were getting nothing, and the customer ever knowing they were probably paying way too much.
All of that was pretty easy to notice by some of you with the way he announced his offerings, with their prices, and with how he never named the artists most of the time, even taking credits for them at times. He never wanted them to have a discussion with the customer, language barrier or not.
Fortunately for us, it all fell appart when some artists that he approached at some point told us everything, and when one specific scam was brought to our attention.
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To make things even worse, he lied about his health, pretending to have a life-threatening disease and that he needed money to recover. He does have a disease, but not a life-threatening one; A congenital retrocerebellar cyst that he has since birth.(https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/arachnoid-cysts) . He tried to play the sympathy card and some people got scammed by that.
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He also lied about a fundraising made to do something for a deceased member of the community (which he never talked to), and ended up doing nothing with it. We don’t know where the money went, probably in his pockets. (Anix got scammed like us, he was mourning the loss of a friend and Fern took that to his advantage)
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But we know that some of that money went into other things than his «health concerns», since back in the Russian community, he bought a new GPU with the money he ran away with (a GTX Titan X if you are curious).
We know that the amounts people got scammed for can go from a few dollars, to $250 if not more. The total amount he scammed people for (not in those chats, but in others like Merpcrew and such) might be over several thousand dollars, making his claims to be «poor» false.
He got warned multiple times about his strange behavior, and we had to create a strict policy on comms that he didn’t like: People are only authorized to post commissions offerings if the money goes directly to the artists without any middle man (to avoid that kind of situation). Of course he tried to bypass that rule by talking to us, but we refused.
Even if we ended up kicked him out from all Vilous spaces, he tried to appeal his ban numerous times, even messaging Mick directly (who didn’t have any idea who he was before since we left her away from that) to make us change our decision.
We know that for some people it’s a lot to take at once, but for the safety of everyone, we ask of you all to relay that post in other Chats/Discords you know he could probably be in.
We also know he might try bypass bans by using alt accouts, they might be those from his artists, or completly new ones. Be careful to which paypal you’re giving money to. If someone is looking suspect, send us a message.
We’re terribly sorry for what happened, and the time it took to get everything sorted out, We won’t let that happen ever again. For the time being, do not go and harass him or his artists. You can boycott him, blacklist him, tell other people about it, but please do not harass him directly, that’ll only make the situation more difficult for us to deal with.
The russian part of the community is preparing a document about his past behavior in those chats, we’ll link it as soon as it’s ready. Until then, take care, and be careful to who you entrust your money to.