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.
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...
