[cmeacham98]

Legal consequences aren't the only form of consequences. In this post the author mentions their (legitimate) business.

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.

[boudin]

Did you read the post to the very end? I don't see anything immoral, he just spotted a weakness in Patreon, warned Patreon and wrote a blog post about it. Nothing wrong here.

[cmeacham98]

Yes, I did read the post until the end.

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.

[boudin]

You're right, I'm the one who misread the end, I thought the author said he wrote to Patreon, which doesn't seem to be the case. This is not great...