Client Scams Graphic Artists/Illustrator using Paypal Chargeback Service

[NycoleART]

I was commissioned by a client on Discord ( now the account is no longer active) to design a logo, icon and header for their game server.

Client was sent an invoice but had his 'friend' sent the money personally to my email on the invoice instead. Client then panicked stating that he might have had sent to the wrong email. I reassured him that I have received the payment but not via the invoice so I manually marked the invoice as paid ( Big Mistake from Me) Thus , I begun the graphic design service as I was told. He even asked for a few rounds of revisions which I have performed to his satisfaction. The client was satisfied and left a feedback , his exact word is 'perfect' .

A month later , he filed a chargeback against me stating that he has not received the service and that I have given him a poor treatment. Despite providing our chat history transcript and invoice which clearly shows that the client had received the product, that evidence was later deemed not effective. They won the case. Today , I have found out about their discord server which was full of the graphics art I have made for them. They basically ran away with the money and the art altogether, and are now using the logo and icon as their community which they proudly show off to people.

In the process , despite asking the client to re-contact with me personally to receive the files , force-sending the files to them. They did not care. I'm not sure how is it not obvious that it wasn't their intentions to resolve the issue , but to scam and keep both the money and the art instead.

Since that I have ran out of options. Contacting Paypal support agent didn't really help as they couldn't really help much. One of them even asked me to file a police report instead but this was an international transaction and seems like a small case for the police, so I'm not sure if I should do that. Since then , I have had asked one of my friend from the art and design community for help and his friend found out about the past of this client scamming people in our community. What I can do now is only warning other artists and developers in the community to be extra careful when dealing with this client.

However , it is easy to create multiple accounts to continue scamming people for their service nowadays. My speculation is that the inactive account is most likely a alternate account that is used to scam people under different names. Either that or this client is a middleman and they are associated, or have their relationship had fell apart somewhere in between the last month.

I'm just surprised that how easy it is to be on the buyer's side to scam people around for digital products. I feel that Paypal needs to improve on that.