Belle Delphine’s Viral ‘Gamer Girl Bath Water’ Cost Her $90K

Cosplayer and OnlyFans creator Belle Delphine recently revealed that she earned no money from her 2019 viral “Gamer Girl Bath Water” stunt because PayPal was charging her weird fees and keeping the funds for itself. Almost five years later, Business Insider reports that the internet celebrity’s “biggest L” has finally turned into a “W” as PayPal has decided to refund her the money she’d earned after getting called out online.

“Since it’s been a couple years now I can finally share the biggest L I’ve ever taken,” Delphine tweeted on May 6. “Not only did I not earn any money selling my bathwater, I in fact LOST money doing it. PayPal without any warning closed my PayPal account and took the $90,000 that I earned from selling my bathwater.”

She continued:

There was nothing I could do, I tried phoning them up and they just said ‘sorry, nothing we can do!’ I knew it would be a better news story to say that I made ‘sOoOo much money’ from selling my bathwater so I just kept this secret…Ultimately I’m still glad I did it since it was a really funny time on the internet when it happened, and I still did mail out all the bathwater people bought from me (which I did all by myself) Sooo… fuck PayPal I guess?

In the summer of 2019 Delphine started marketing her bath water for $30 per jar in a series of social media posts that went viral and became perfect fodder for internet engagement in the way that absurd, voyeuristic shenanigans that mix eroticism and parody often do. People bought the bath water. Some claimed to have tested it for human DNA and accused Delphine of scamming them when it was revealed to not contain any. It turned out the bath water hadn’t even been shipped out yet and they were just making it up to clout chase on YouTube. A wild time was had by all. She said on a podcast earlier this year that she sold about 600 bottles total.

Delphine now explains that selling the bath water was apparently a violation of PayPal’s terms of service, with each infringement costing her $2,500. She said the company would tell her at the time what the problem was but the end result was that all of her revenue from sales of the gamer girl bath water were seemingly confiscated. “So I don’t know if it’s because they don’t allow sex workers to use their platform or if they had a specific issue with me selling bathwater…regardless not even knowing felt shit.”

PayPal had seemingly confiscated thousands from the account and closed it until recently, when Business Insider and others reached out to the payment processing company for comment on the situation. While the $2,500 penalty policy was dropped last year, it wasn’t until this month that PayPal reportedly decided to return Delphine’s money. “If I didn’t have any [social media] following, they wouldn’t have given my money back,” Delphine told Business Insider. “Which is so shitty because what are all the normal non-social media users meant to do in this situation? I followed all the normal protocols and was roadblocked and gave up.”

It’s a version of what seems to happen all the time with online content creators who are at the mercy of massive platforms and the financial institutions which power their monetization. People get snagged on the internal machinery of faceless institutions with no one to help them out or explain what’s going on until it goes viral. For every Delphine who eventually gets their account issues settled, hundreds of others probably just give up. After all, that’s basically what she did until deciding to tweet about it on a whim years after the fact.