HanaKin, above, was the one with the highest amount of sales of the infringing tattoos - just over $200K!
I guess I should be selling temporary tattoos! I'd probably need to get them produced in bulk because I don't know that people would be willing to pay the amount I'd need to charge if I tried making some myself on my Cricut at home.
From hope to disappointment
Because the judge didn't freeze all the Amazon accounts, once the sellers were served & notified of the lawsuit they simply drained their accounts.
There was some sort of restriction but I'm not completely clear on who's accounts were restricted, in what way and for how long.
Whatever limited freeze they implemented it did lead to a few settlements at first from the smaller sellers in the 2025 - 26 winter season. Since they were settled I can't tell you how much or from who, but it was just enough to carry me through a really crappy winter for sales.
It helped me survive, still not enough to get needed dental work done, take a desperately needed vacation or start up a retirement plan. Maybe if the economy for artists and luxury goods were better that would have been an extra bonus I could have applied towards those things, but in the end it really just replaced the sales I should have been making.
I thought that 'limited freeze' I was told about was still in effect by the time the data subpoenaed from Amazon was finally provided and the hearing happened in May. I really thought I'd finally get some substantial relief from all this IP theft, but before the final judgement I was told that 'essentially zero' was recoverable at the time.
The only way the money is recoverable, is if the platforms have it in their accounts to transfer since these are all overseas shops and pretty much untouchable if their funds aren't in a US platform like Amazon.
That's also why I hadn't said anything publicly about this and kept it quiet for a couple years while working on the case. You don't want the copycats to take all their money out & close shop before the lawsuit is finalized and before you can access the funds owed to you.
Many of them are manufacturing items themselves.
The lawsuit files with the seller names are always under seal as well in these Schedule A cases, unless they've been ruled guilty of infringement. That's why if you look up my case on PACER there are quite a few pages that are all blacked out.
I was gutted.
I had allowed myself to look forward to and plan for having enough to finally take a vacation - we haven't taken a real one or traveled anywhere since 2016 - to create new products, fix my teeth, to invest in costuming for photos and to be able to support other artists by purchasing their art, to donate to all the causes important to me, etc. and now that wasn't happening.
Learning exactly how much was made from only the top 5 sellers when I'd found nearly 50 of them throughout those couple years in total really dumped my mood in the trash. Nearly $385K. God dammit.
Of course, the attorneys take a big cut out of that, that's pretty standard since this was done on contingency so I didn't have to pay anything out of pocket but it STILL would have been a life changing amount of money. I could have possibly even put a down payment on a house, which I pretty much gave up on ever being able to do again after losing my first one during the market crash when my marriage & business imploded.
What I wasn't expecting was for the judge to order other platforms like Paypal, Wish.com, and others to freeze their funds as well although I'm told by my attorneys that there wasn't a lot of hope for that. We don't even know if they're using those platforms and they may be under a completely different name, unidentifiable.
Apparently there's a small amount Amazon was able to collect as a few of them still have some other listings active, but after the attorneys' cut I won't even get 5 figures.
Whether those listings will stay active, or if I'll get paid more later I'm not sure & can’t get a definitive answer. I was told that a lot of sellers prefer to abandon their shops rather than pay.
I know I should be grateful that I got anything at all, and I'm glad that at least the wearable wings are no longer on their site. But there are still 5 of the tattoo listings up from the dismissed defendants, which I had previously been told wouldn't happen. At the very least I thought there wouldn't be anyone selling these things on Amazon anymore but even that expectation was apparently too much.
I'm also now finding a different version of the same design in temp tattoos (below) and don't even know if I can do anything about them yet :/
This is not the only site selling them, I also saw them on Temu because of course.
