Mel and I agreed to a $300 piece of my character with a background. The original agreement is on a Twitter account I deleted years ago, but here are my payments as well as a message on Facebook that she would be working on it.
Mel had delivered 6 smaller commissions in the past, so I trusted her and was fine with waiting. When she started, things seemed to progress smoothly. (Text with personal details are marked out.)
I reached out occasionally from Twitter (on the same account that I had deleted) for updates. On her Trello, my piece was last updated in 2019: https://trello.com/b/DTDzsnqX/commissions
2020 was the last time I sent a message on Twitter. I realized I had not heard from her in a while, so when I went to ask about the commission status, I saw Mel had set her Twitter account to protected (so I could not contact her). I then tried to reach out to her on Furaffinity and saw my account was blocked.
I tried to contact Mel one more time by e-mail.
I saw the next day that she had disabled her Furaffinity account and deleted her Twitter.
I had felt that things were progressing smoothly, if slowly, and nothing seemed out of place. So I was very surprised by the quiet account block. It was only after these events that I checked Artist Beware and saw she had bewares under previous account names. I hope this helps others avoid the trouble.
