Furry Convention Drama - Because you can't have a couple thousand dog fucking enthusiasts under the same roof without shit hitting the fan

So it's been a couple of months since I started looking into the CCFC drama, and I think I've finally hit the end of my research. I've got three smaller developments I wanna archive first though. Also, @Catch Your Breath, if you're interested, I could potentially combine all of my previous research into a writeup that could be added to the thread OP, just let me know. Anyways, onto some more concentrated autism:

First, I found out that Sylox and Lifty (two of the furries I talked with back in May about CCFC) have run a podcast for a while talking about furry things. In late June, they made an episode where they invited Tripp (the 3rd furry I talked with) and Shadow (the furry who put his credit card on the line for the convention) and talked about CCFC. The episode was uploaded to youtube and you can listen to it here if you're curious. Since it's audio-only, I also downloaded it as an MP3 and attached it to this post in case it gets taken down. From my casual listening of the episode, most of the things they discussed were re-treading earlier points I already brought up, but if nothing else, it does provide hard testimony from multiple people to reinforce my posts from May.

Next, I wanted to see if Nitro had been charged with anything over the misappropriation of charity funds yet, so I looked into the Pennsylvania public court records. While there doesn't seem to be any updates to that yet, I did find something else by accident that's pretty funny; Turns out that Nitro's been taken to court FOUR times in the past and has a proven track record of ghosting people.

If anyone wants to look this up for themselves, Pennsylvania's court dockets can be publicly viewed by going to this link. You can search by participant name (Nitro's real name, Matthew Soltys) and these 4 dockets are the only things in the last ten years related to him.
(disclaimer: reading/interpreting legal documents is not my strong suit. If I got any of this incorrect, feel free to correct me and I'll update this post.)

This one was mentioned earlier in the thread, but in March 2018, Nitro was sued by a former landlord of an apartment building. The landlord filed a claim for $1,244.21, seemed to win but only got $299.73 out of it. It's not clear if this was for unpaid rent or for damage in the apartment.


In addition, Nitro was taken to court over three separate traffic-related incidents, the first one being July 2018. It looks like he repeatedly ignored summons for the first two incidents and had a third infraction happen before resolving the first two. From what I can tell, incident 1 involved driving on an expired license or vehicle registration, the second seems to be for his registration being suspended, and the third is related to speeding.

So what makes these traffic infractions notable? Across all three incidents, he has ignored or canceled summons to appear in court for them at least 23 times, causing a simple fine for speeding to be dragged out for well over a year. The third incident still seems to be ongoing as of this writing despite the incident happening in August 2019, with the most recent cancellation happening in July 2020.



Anyways, I suppose this is going to be my last bit of CCFC research, at least until Nitro is taken to court or does something to put himself in the limelight again, so let's end this on a small positive. I mentioned in an earlier post that Uncle Kage attended CCFC and was rightfully upset about the charity money being misappropriated, so he set up a fundraiser for the ALS charity as a big "fuck you" to Nitro that raised roughly double what CCFC supposedly raised. Slight powerlevel, I donated to the fundraiser, I have a relative who was diagnosed with ALS so this all hit a personal nerve for me. He sent this email out a few days ago to everyone who donated, notably referring to CCFC as the "Unnamed Convention".

Capital City Furcon 2020
In spite of all the drama caused by problematic furries at conventions, one facet that often gets overlooked at many of these events is the sheer amount of planning and manpower needed to pull off a successful convention. If things aren’t organized properly with clear communication between everyone involved, things can quickly degenerate into disorganized chaos. One of the most prominent examples of this was 2014’s Dashcon, a Tumblr-themed convention that went down in internet history as being run by hilariously inept Tumblr users with zero experience. So what happens when you take the poor planning of Dashcon, add more furfaggotry, and throw in a dash of fraud? You get the first major furry drama of 2020, Capital City Furcon, CCFC for short, located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Unlike Rainfurrest being remembered for the degeneracy among the guests, CCFC will be remembered mostly for the poor planning and incompetence of the chairman, as well as one of the few 2020 furry events that weren't canceled due to Covid-19.

CCFC was founded by Matthew Soltys, known more commonly by his fursona name Nitro.


2021 UPDATE: This writeup focuses primarily on CCFC itself. Nitro/Matthew has since earned his own dedicated thread on Kiwi Farms, which can be read here.

According to a former friend of Nitro, he started the event purely as a vanity event in the hopes that people would see it as "his" event, much like how people associate Anthrocon with Uncle Kage or FurAffinity with Dragoneer. Nitro’s only prior experience with running events was volunteering at a furry meetup somewhere in Ohio. Several people familiar with the event have alleged Nitro siphoned money from that event to fund CCFC, but I don't have legitimate evidence to back that up.

From what I've heard from furries in the surrounding areas, Nitro had an iffy reputation well before announcing this event. For a period of time, he was known for his near-constant e-begging, and in early 2018, he was evicted from his apartment and sued by his landlord for a combination of unpaid rent and property damage. It’s also worth pointing out that Nitro has an EXTENSIVE public record of ignoring debts and repeatedly canceling summons to appear in court, causing cases like the aforementioned apartment eviction and even a simple traffic violation to get dragged out to literal years.



Act 1: CCFC Planning: This is how you DON’T do furcon organization
Nitro has claimed that he had been planning this event for two years prior to first announcing it around March 2019 (which is when most of the social media pages for CCFC went live), but given the lack of very basic planning like a hotel contract, this seems debatable. Nitro then recruited a few of his friends for staff and made plans to have the event ready for January 2020. Essentially from the start, this was a convention being run by furries with little to no amount of experience running anything. From the beginning, it was disorganized, messy, and communication was nonexistent. Literally, no one except for Nitro knew what was going on most of the time.

CCFC had very little advertising to promote the event, his strategy boiled down to “privately message every single moderately popular furry in existence and ask if they’d be interested in being a Guest of Honor in exchange for shilling CCFC”. A former staff who had shared access to the CCFC twitter claimed that Nitro would message dozens of furries every day for months on end with these proposals. Nitro also had people show up at other furry conventions and hand out the guest of honor applications to random furries (though he later denied doing this).


Nitro explicitly only offered GoH applications to fursuiters, with the only exception to that rule being Uncle Kage, presumably as a chance to show off to Kage. It's also worth taking a look at the incredibly amateurish contract they had GoH sign:


Take note of how it has multiple typos, how there's no information about what will specifically be offered to the guests (eg what expenses will be covered), and how there's no information about what is obligated from the guests while they are at the convention (eg you're required to appear at x panel). They instead left it really vague with "help where help is needed" which theoretically means Nitro could have asked GoH for anything at CCFC and they'd have to oblige, whether it's appearing at a certain event, or to help move equipment around.

At one point, Nitro managed to convince Lifty (a furry who helped run social media and promotion for BronyCon) to help with the pre-planning, but Lifty ultimately ended up quitting after Nitro continually ignored their advice and continued to make decisions without consulting the rest of the staff. Nitro also commissioned several local artists to make promotional artwork for CCFC, and by "commission" I mean "not pay them until it's finished, harass them until they give up and drop the project, then take their unfinished art and have a cheaper artist trace over it".

The few staff that Nitro had hired for the event were primarily made up of his friends and random furries Nitro recruited at local fur meets in Pennsylvania, most of whom were essentially people who wanted to put on an event but had little idea on how to do it correctly. The general consensus from local furries at the time was that the event wasn't even going to happen, Nitro was promising a lot and didn't have much to show for it other than some promotional art and multiple social media account. In spite of all that, he was still able to secure a contract with an (admittedly nice) hotel in Harrisburg around May 2019.


Act 1 Paralogue: The York fundraising incident

In July 2019, Nitro tried to raise awareness for CCFC's existence by running a "charity fundraiser" where people could show up, have fun, learn about CCFC, and raise some money for charity. On the surface, that's not a terrible idea, but Nitro's ineptitude reared its ugly head again. Nitro ran the event on July 20th for a very specific reason; there was another furry event happening later that same day not too far from his, the York Furbowl, a reasonably popular bi-monthly event held in a bowling alley in the York, PA area. Presumably, he thought that if he planned it earlier on the same day, furries who were going to the furbowl would come to his event too. Hell, the park Nitro was holding this event at was only 11 minutes from the bowling alley.

To put it simply, his plan didn't work very well. While he had roughly 50 people show up and raise $666 "for charity" (the charity has since claimed they didn't receive any of it and it most likely went toward funding CCFC), he did next to no advertising for the event. Most local furries had no idea the event even happened until a few hours after it ended. In comparison, the York Furbowl had about 93 people show up, with next to no intersection of furries who attended both events. Nitro was heavily criticized by the York Furbowl attendees for trying to mooch off of another event's popularity, but he got away with it due to being friends with someone in charge of the York Furbowl, and Nitro himself continued to attend the York events, or at least until CCFC happened.

As of this writing, York furbowl is currently on hold due to COVID, but Nitro has been pre-emptively banned from showing up to future events whenever they're allowed to start up safely again. The owner of the event initially planned to let Nitro continue to attend, but they caved after roughly half of the regular attendees threatened to stop coming if Nitro wasn't banned.


Act 2: CCFC, or how I learned to love the bomb (of a convention)
Surprisingly and against all odds, the event was still planned to run in early January 2020. This was in spite of the fact that the event was grossly understaffed (around 15 staff and volunteers in total), and the few staff he had were either grossly inexperienced and/or problematic furries with a history of questionable behavior. The hotel had not been properly paid in advance as was agreed in their contract. He also had the problem of promising far too many people the chance to be a guest of honor (roughly 20 furries took him up on the offer), so he cut the list down to about 7 and told the others he would cover the costs of their rooms as an apology.

CCFC was originally advertised as a 4-day event (Thursday-Sunday), but they immediately hit two major snags on Thursday afternoon. First, they didn’t account that the previous event at the hotel was a political event with several important politicians and armed guards present and had to run around in a panic, telling the furries “don’t wear your fursuits yet, there are armed guards and we don’t want anyone getting hurt”, which forced them to reschedule all the Thursday events at the last possible moment. Secondly, the hotel demanded the pre-payment they were promised in the contract and told Nitro that if the issue was not resolved by the end of the day, they would shut down the event. Astute readers who are familiar with Dashcon should be having a huge sense of deja vu right about now.


Nitro first tried to come up with the money by pressuring his staff member Tripp (who was a college student at the time) to give up his tuition money to cover the bill. Due to transfer limits at Tripp's bank and his parents refusing to let him use the money for this, it didn’t happen, but that didn’t stop Nitro from continually trying to push him into going over their parents' heads and donating it anyways (even after they resolved the billing issue). The CCFC WikiFur article incorrectly claims Nitro took $15K from Tripp, but Tripp has since clarified that he offered it but never actually gave any of that money to Nitro.


Nitro then found his friend Shadow who was attending the event, lying by saying they needed someone to put their credit card on the hotel’s “as a security measure” and they wouldn’t be charged anything, with Nitro giving some flimsy excuse saying his card was declined and he totally had the money, it was just frozen in the bank temporarily and he couldn’t get it out until after CCFC. Shadow stupidly agreed to put his credit card down, and this is the only reason the event was allowed to continue.

Surprisingly, the rest of CCFC generally went smoothly, at least from the perspective of the attendees. Granted, There were issues with all the panels being rescheduled last minute and all the hotel information panels had every event listed as starting and ending at 4 am, and a few panels ended up happening without the hosts showing up. But most of the attendees didn’t have much to complain about and were also completely unaware of the near-shutdown Thursday. Contrary to popular belief, Uncle Kage even showed up, hung out with some furries, did a panel or two, and helped run the charity auction on Sunday. It's also known that there was absolutely no enforcement of people wearing kink or fetish gear in public, but CCFC mostly lucked out in this regard because most of the attendees were civil and well-behaved.

Nitro apparently did very little in the way of managing during CCFC; former staff said he spent far too much time casually socializing with people instead of actually managing things, leaving most of the staff to fend for themselves. The head of the dealer’s den was heavily criticized for her unprofessional behavior to other dealers and staff, and the head of security had a well-known reputation of associating with problematic people and ignoring legitimate emergencies to get overly drunk when he was supposed to be working. The rest of the staff generally tried their best to keep things running smoothly without any guidance.

The real drama didn’t ramp up until after the closing ceremonies on Sunday. First off, Nitro claimed they raised about $4,000 for charity (though a friend of his later confirmed it was actually around $4600), then immediately announced that he was stepping down as chairman and the new chairman was a random DJ who played at one of the dances. He also gave a (very justified) ban to the security staff. After that, he went radio silent for a few weeks and forced his new chairman to deal with the ensuing mess.

As it turns out, Nitro had promised all the guests of honor that they would have their hotel bills paid for, only for all of them to find out upon checking out of the hotel that they were now stuck paying the entire bill. The staff was also promised to have their badges and rooms comped, only to find out later that was not the case. Shadow (Nitro’s friend who put his credit card on the hotel) was suddenly hit with a bill for $12,000. One of the GoH was a deaf fursuiter who was never provided an interpreter, which blatantly violates ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) guidelines and Nitro could face serious legal trouble if they file for disability discrimination. People who pre-registered for the event but were unable to make it were denied refunds. And to top it all off, the ALS Association (CCFC's charity) never received the money that was raised for them.


Even though Nitro presumably saved thousands by ignoring all the promised comps to guests and staff, the event was ultimately run at a significant financial loss. After being bombarded with questions about money issues he had no part in, the new chairman quit within a couple of days. Shadow was able to work with his credit card company to transfer the bill over to Nitro, and everyone else ultimately had no choice but to take the financial hit and move on. Nitro attempted to deflect any criticism over himself or how poorly CCFC's planning was by claiming that “Blaming Nitro” is a meme. He even went so far as to get #BlameNitro merchandise made in time for CCFC (that nobody bought). He ordered 200 “commemorative” ribbons, and as of this writing, all 200 are still in stock on the CCFC merch page.



Act 3: the death of a (fur)con
Most of the people who just went to CCFC as regular attendees had little to no idea that any of this was going on behind the scenes, so the drama died down for a few months. Not much discussion of CCFC happened online until about May 2020, when it was brought up in the very Kiwi Farms thread that you’re reading right now. After a few posts discussing the lack of public information surrounding the event, the thread caught the attention of Tripp, who offered to talk with the Farms and share his side of the story.


Since he was willing to talk, I decided to reach out to him, and it culminated in a long conversation with him and a few other former staff. I asked them every question that was brought up in the thread at that point. It's an absolutely insane conversation and it's far too long for me to include in this writeup, so I strongly suggest reading it here in its entirety if you have some time. Things took a dramatic and surprising turn a few weeks later on June 11th, when Tripp decided to publicly call out CCFC and demand that Nitro provide proof that he donated the $4000 that was raised for charity.

(archive)

A few hours later, the CCFC Twitter posted a weirdly-capitalized announcement stating that CCFC would be ending and they would keep the social media up.


The sudden closure prompted even more furries to ask what happened to the charity money, to which the CCFC Twitter responded by tweeting a picture of a donation receipt for $217, which people quickly pointed out was not made by Nitro, but instead made by someone else who donated independently during the actual event in January (Said receipt has the person’s dox on it, so I will not be posting it here). When it was pointed out that Nitro effectively doxed someone unrelated to CCFC and was trying to take credit for their donation, he responded by going into DFE mode, destroying most of the CCFC social media pages as well as his own. Several people familiar with the event have since shared their experiences with CCFC and Nitro.


While it hasn’t been definitively proven yet, it’s widely believed that Nitro either pocketed the charity money, or he used it to pay off some of the outstanding CCFC debts. Nitro attempted to return to Twitter via a new account in September, but he ended up setting the account to private a few days later after immediately getting mocked and ridiculed by everyone. He's known to still be fairly active on Howlr (a Tinder knock-off for furries) attempting to get into the pants of furries who are unaware of his shitty reputation.

Around the same time, someone managed to get in contact with Nitro’s roommate and ask about the charity money, which Nitro responded to by having the roommate forward a photograph of a donation receipt. However, it was quickly revealed to be a forgery, as he photoshopped a receipt off google, printed it out, then took a photo of it. This only increased the animosity towards Nitro.

(the 2nd pic is Nitro's "proof", 3rd is the receipt he stole off google)

According to someone I was in contact with that is familiar with the Pennsylvania furry scene, several furries unattached to all this drama tried to start up a new furry event in Lancaster PA (shortly before Covid started forcing events to be canceled), only for it to be immediately rejected due to the hotel being familiar with CCFC. Rumor has it that any proposed event in the Harrisburg and Lancaster area that has "furry" in the title or description is automatically rejected, with Nitro as the cited reason why.

Multiple people are currently taking legal action against Nitro over a number of issues, including unpaid debts, multiple breaches of contracts, charity fraud, and the aforementioned minor traffic cases that he's let drag on for years. I don’t have any more information I can post on those yet, especially as I don't want to risk interfering with the cases. Ultimately, one of the only positives that happened from all this drama was a fundraiser that Uncle Kage started. It was raising funds for the charity to help recoup the money CCFC was supposed to donate, which ended up raising roughly $8K. Nitro has been banned for life from nearly every furry event in Pennsylvania and surrounding states, and most of the former CCFC staff were recruited by other conventions.


Act 4: Nitro NITRO'S "COUSIN" has an insane meltdown
On October 13th, 2020, Nitro made a resurgence online which led to a cataclysmic meltdown that eliminated any possible shred of sympathy anyone might have had for him. In the days leading up to this, Nitro had secretly been in contact with a fursuit maker attempting to buy a donkey fursuit they had put up for sale. The maker put it up on a furry auction site for $5K, but Nitro offered to pay $10K on the condition that they had to ship him the suit first before he sent them any money, presumably in an attempt to scam the maker out of the suit and get it for free. Nitro was so confident he was going to get the suit that he immediately set up multiple social media accounts for a "Cyder the Donkey" and proceeded to follow hundreds of furries at once with them. To Nitro, this seemed like the perfect plan; he could attempt to re-integrate with the furries he so desperately craved validation from, and they wouldn't immediately know it was him if he was wearing a brand-new suit.


Nitro made three glaring mistakes that made furries think something fishy was going on almost immediately. First, the avatar he used for this account was a cropped photo grabbed directly from the auction page, which was discovered via a simple reverse image search. Second, Cyder tweeted several fursuit photos of Briggs, a furry Nitro was known to be dating (Briggs has since claimed they broke up well before this and he did not give permission for these photos to be tweeted). Third, someone decided to chat with Cyder on Telegram, and "Cyder" sent an undoctored selfie, assuming nobody would recognize him out of the suit.


When people realized who Cyder really was, somebody warned the fursuit maker about Nitro's shady past. This prompted Nitro to re-activate the official CCFC Twitter account and go on a bizarre incoherent rant, claiming that he's going to jail soon, that Cyder was actually his cousin and TOTALLY not him, that Tripp was a liar who ruined his reputation, that everyone who went to CCFC was a liar, that he used the CCFC charity money to pay down some of the debt he racked up, and this is all everybody else's fault but his. Tripp responded mockingly, which only increased Nitro's anger and caused even more people to start trolling him on Twitter, and the fursuit maker decided to cancel the sale of the donkey suit entirely.


I'm going to let these next posts speak for themselves. Please read them in their entirety, they're absolutely hilarious:


One set of arguments I want to single out is this one involving a friend of the fursuit maker. Nitro is still insisting that it was his "cousin" who was buying the suit and provided "proof" consisting of a bizarre DM he sent the seller after they canceled the sale. Nitro continued to insist Cyder was not him by tweeting a photo of two random people from Cyder's account. I'm not sure who these people in the photo are, but I'm thinking it might be his bad attempt at doxing someone unrelated, so I'm censoring the faces as a precaution. The Cyder account was nuked shortly afterward.


Unfortunately for Nitro, the fursuit seller was smart enough to save their earlier DMs which confirm that 1) Nitro was communicating with the seller using the same NRooski Twitter account he locked earlier in September, and 2) he outright told the seller he was also Cyder.


In Nitro's Nitro's COUSIN's final post in his incoherent meltdown before he stopped tweeting, he demanded proof that he was lying. Somebody links him to this very thread, fucking lol.


The next day, Nitro came back to the CCFC account and tweeted the contract he signed with the ALS association for some reason.



Here are a few takeaways from this:
-Nitro estimated 200-400 people would show up to the event. The final count was around 380-ish people.
-He estimated the CCFC expenses would be about $50K and he'd make $55K with the event.
-On the question asking if CCFC was a registered 501(c)(3) charity (something that nearly every convention is registered as for tax and charity donation reasons), he left the question blank.
-He requested 800 ALS wristbands for an event he predicted would have 400 people show up.
-The address listed on the last page of the contract leads to a townhouse in York PA, which is also listed as the business address of "DJMSOL ENTERTAINMENT" (MSOL presumably short for Matthew SOLtys), Nito's side business of DJ/AV work.

Nitro went back into hiding shortly after this, going under yet another locked account and hoping this will all blow over eventually. As of this writing, it's currently the very creatively-named "CyderDonk" If you're wondering how I know it's actually him, it's because of a white knight revealing it themselves through constantly tagging him in older (pre-Cyder) tweets, defending Nitro apropos of nothing, and commissioning an artist to do artwork of Nitro and tagging this newer Cyder account on it.


Additional reading and special thanks
This writeup is the culmination of several months worth of research and concentrated autism, And as a personal achievement, it also happens to be my first OP/summary I've made for the Farms! There's actually a lot of less important information I've omitted for the sake of keeping this summary from getting overly long, so I'll link to some of the notable research posts here for those who'd like a more in-depth read:

I'd also like to give shoutouts to @Catch Your Breath for starting the thread and giving a few suggestions on places to start, @LurkerDog for providing me access to a leaked CCFC feedback chat, @Labhraidh for providing me a starting point with Nitro's dox and court records, and @Randomcatgirl for providing the "lovely" photos of Nitro I used at the beginning of this writeup.