Nah. It's not fraud if they don't get any benefit from it. Since they refunded the single, solitary person who pledged $3/month, then shut it all down, it's all good from the fraud angle.
It's wire-fraud and it's a federal crime. "Refunding people" doesn't change the fact that a crime has been committed, period. This isn't a legal advice.
I am not a lawyer, but I doubt refunding your fraud victim after the fact gets you off the hook for fraud. If the victim or the police wanted to pursue that.
I think it might make it difficult to prove intent to defraud if you immediately return the cash. Is it theft if a magician picks your pocket but then returns the wallet at the end of the trick? By the most technical sense of the term, it might. But i can't imagine a prosecutor that would go after something like that.
I see what you're trying for but I don't think the magician analogy is accurate. Bare minimum you agreed to sit and watch the magic show, and every time I've seen a magician involve the audience they always start with "Can I get a volunteer?", at which point it's clear you're a willing participant (yes, you don't know what's about to happen, but the magician gives the wallet back after so it's clear about the entertaining show and not an example of the magician attempting to commit a crime)
> Is it theft if a magician picks your pocket but then returns the wallet at the end of the trick?
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.
A dead comment asked if stealing 100 dollars if fine if you give it back.
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.
> But if the intent all along was to return it the next day, stored safely the entire time, that's not theft.
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 parent isn't claiming that it's legal to take something so long as you have intent to return it. Just that the standard definition of theft requires "permanently" as an element, and maybe taking something temporarily would be some other crime.
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.
> Yes, it happened to be used by someone else previously, but how is that his fault?
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.