Fatcat17 - Co-Conspirator on this scam. He receives Money from gumdrop to do nothing and pretend hes working for him.
Don't mix fatcat into it. He's an animator and he was commissioned by gumdrop to make an animation for him.
What an animator does is prepare a sequence of movements of either a wire mesh or its underlying skeleton.
What an animator does not usually do is prepare a final product. He might do it, but that costs extra and you pay for every render and re-render if you want corrections because those things take a lot of time.
In a way, commissioning an animator is much like buying bricks at a store and expecting them to deliver a house.
If you want to commission somebody, they're under exactly zero obligation to look at your history and they have zero obligation to refuse if your reputation is not spotless.
Taking a commission from gumdrop is not something that taints you.
I figure gumdrop thought it would be trivial to do the animation and have a bone to throw to his followers for a while. What he didn't expect is that fatcat wouldn't provide material to be readily used by him. If it's a Blender animation and you never used Blender, you're in for a nasty surprise if you want the animation to fit seamlessly into the game.
I think gumdrop used DAZ and after switching to Blender and trying to animate, he realized it's not going to be as simple as clicking "Render" and snipping the animation into pieces to throw to his loving masses.