Prominent Artist NeonBeat Taken To Task for Alleged Commission Scam

Get Contracts or Get Rekt, Babes

At 12:27AM of February 4th 2024, Twitter user demenishki (AKA deme) posted a tweet in all caps, accusing talented artist NeonBeat619 of “[…] ghosting yet refusing people’s refunds after not doing peoples commissions after months or even years.” [sic] Their plea was for users to stop commissions to the artist who has allegedly never stopped taking commissions despite having a very long line of people waiting for him to work on their pieces for which they have already paid.

deme, a user with 391,000 followers on Twitter and over 250,000 on YouTube characterizes themselves as a “disabled gamer” and is what is called a “vtuber” on Twitch and YouTube—someone who uses a moving avatar as their persona rather than streaming video of themselves in the corner of their game streams. Many vtubers like to have collections of artwork featuring these avatars as they can use them on their streams as backgrounds for opening or exiting sequences, keeping their streams fresh and up to date. Vtubers have to make certain that they’re budgeting enough of their YouTube or Twitch income in order to pay for these pieces of art because for them, this is about business whereas other types of commissions are more about fun. It is this major difference that plays the largest part in the criticism of NeonBeat’s commission “style” (which seems to boil down to taking on too many commissions, receiving all payment up front, and then ceasing most communication until the commission is finished) and Neon’s willingness to take advantage of commissioners’ general inability to create waves in the art sphere and simply take their money and then wait for them to go away, never having received anything at all. When it comes to smaller follower count users and the way they often feel about having been ghosted by artists with huge followings (NeonBeat’s follower count is around 198,100), it is incredibly difficult for most to conceptualize that they even have the power to call out an artist, as that artist may have access to plenty of other artists and might blacklist them from commissioning someone else. deme was not to be deterred and it was from there that the similar experiences began to flood in, finding their place in quote retweets below the original call out tweet.

Twitter user ArunaReaver who spent $600.00 on art from NeonBeat lamented, “I love neon beat so much and wish the best for him but I am truly disappointed that my starting soon screen art was promised to be finished before my debut 3 times and it didn’t happen […] and I keep receiving false completion deadlines and I’m now getting no response at all.” User vulpixsi stated “he got so many of my friends” and claimed that there was a two year backlog worth of commissions still not finished while user _chiawara mentions that they’re glad they did not spend $3000 on a commission as they had planned. deme provided screenshots of conversations in which it is shown that he has declined refunds and chargebacks and unedited discord screenshots where they ask Neon whatever happened to their art and that “it’s been practically a year bro”. Others speculated that it was “fishy” he didn’t have a Terms of Service but claimed they trusted him since he was “a big artist in the sphere.”

Aside from banking on the fact that young vtubers and commissioners will be gullible enough to pay the whole amount upfront and so chronically averse to confrontation as to simply let it go when they realize that they’re probably never getting their commission, how did NeonBeat “get away” with all of it this long? Well, it’s a well-known fact that good art can never truly be rushed. It can be poked and prodded a bit here and there and given gentle (gentle!) nudges in the correct direction, but most of the time, one cannot simply walk into Mord—I mean, get good art in a short amount of time. Neon’s timetables were actually relatively good and reasonable, they were not, say, three day turn-arounds for $1000 art which would, naturally, raise many alarm bells. Nevertheless, even if a contract stated that work would be completed a year after payment, PayPal’s terms of service automatically prevent chargebacks 180 days (roughly 6 months) from the payment date. Because Neon uses PayPal, he simply waits for the 180 day threshold to be passed before he ceases all communication from his commissioners, having previously led them on through rough drafts and sketches in the months prior. The only hint that anyone has that this was not a fully coordinated scam would be the access that commissioners have to Neon’s Trello board which shows all the public commissions he has waiting in his line-up, those he’s working on and those he has completed. After a video of someone scrolling his “to do” list was released in deme’s call out, deme estimated that if each commission was averaged around $1000, that commission list would equate to approximately $50,000 dollars in obligation.

It’s fairly common for the average artist to miss their deadlines or need a bit of extra time, especially if they are the sort to take on more than one commission at a time, but when it comes to Neon, deme for sure believes this to be a complete scam, writing, “This isn’t the normal artist who accidentally or didn’t realize that amount of work they accepted. This is a scammer. […] He has stolen thousands. Used his status to steal from people. Kept saying he’ll work on it soon. Ignored clients deadlines and gave false promises. Abused PayPal’s 180 day rule to auto win the refund cases.” Whether or not Neon was purposefully designing his commission system around the 180 day PayPal cut-off and genuinely scamming is hard to say when he obviously kept record of at least some of his current obligations and outsiders clearly had access to it. Then again, carjackers routinely accidentally leave their wallets in cars they stole, so anything is possible.

So, what happened next? After the news exploded all over Twitter for the whole world to see in the course of the whole 4th of February, Neon was curiously silent…that was, until 5:30 of the same day, just a mere 17 hours from the initial tweet calling him out. Neon posted a clearly rushed version of deme’s art, failing to properly render much of the lower part of the character and the background. For other artists, this might be a stylistic choice, for NeonBeat, it was a sign of a failed process. In fact, the reaction to the art was so bad that it might have been more beneficial for Neon to simply have not responded at all. deme characterized the tweet as “the most craziest way to address the drama” and pleaded with Neon publicly to “please address how you’re going to move forward now that you have a tremendous waiting line spanning 5 years” [sic] Eventually, the thousands of people who were invested in this saga got exactly that in Neon’s anticlimactic response.

Neon’s statement claims that this was merely a case of him taking on too many commissions by mistake, overestimating his own abilities and the fear of communication due to his inability to fulfill his obligations. Naturally, his invocation of “burn out,” a state in which a creative has worked themselves into stagnation is all too relatable in the creative fields, but most artists and writers who are experiencing it are aware that it is happening or at least that they’re unable to handle their previous workloads whereas it has been shown that Neon would reach out to potential commissioners and vtubers offering commission services, allegedly to flirt with them. Incongruent as this all is with the facts of the matter, NeonBeat’s most glaring error in his messaging is that he implies that he truly does believe that it is still possible to actually finish the commissions rather than simply dole out the refunds. One can obviously guess, then, that the estimated $50,000 he’s taken in upfront costs has been spent and is not available for the refunds necessary, hence why he does not mention any in his statement. It will be interesting to see if anyone might end up finding out how to take this guy to small claims court—they’ve got a good case, after all.

Clearly, this situation will be making quite a few vtubers and commissioners a little gun shy when it comes to commissioning in the future, but there are is a small thing that you can do to make your life a whole hell of a lot easier when it comes to spending your money on art. When Krad and I were first coming up with the concept and business “plan” for FALKE, our joint effort erotic comic available on itch.io for $16.00, one of the very first things we did aside from stylization collages and back-and-forth with concept and design was a contract. Because I was paying for about half of a static cost prior to splitting the proceeds, it was important for Krad to lay out a timetable, mostly for my peace of mind. Krad does shit like this for a living with people far more litigious than I am but the process was generally the same. I get sent the contract, I read through it or have a lawyer read through it, if there needs to be negotiations there are negotiations that end up altering the contract to satisfaction, and then we sign it. That Krad was the artist and the one to insist upon that contract was the best sign of any that I had a very good partner and that everything was going to work out wonderfully. Yeah, like, the comic itself took several years to complete and I’m almost 99% certain that our contract in the end was just a piece of paper since I think our timetable sorta bit the dust after a while, but that shit really was legally binding and I could have invoked its clause to refund my money and never finished the project if it had been a problem. Contracts could be the difference between anxiety and peace of mind—consider them when commissioning art…especially if that art is north of 100 buckaroonies.

And artists…pace yourselves and be realistic with your goals. Please. Don’t NeonBeat yourself up. (LOL - KNEE SLAP)