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A contributor once wrote on hn about the huge market for a porn friendly payment system. Key feature, must not look suspicious on credit card bill...
by jimnotgym 7y ago
A contributor once wrote on hn about the huge market for a porn friendly payment system. Key feature, must not look suspicious on credit card bill...
- emidln 7y agoThese have existed for quite awhile. CCBill was the big player around 10 years ago. They take a slightly larger cut for the service relative to something like a Braintree or a Paypal.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoThe issue here is that it needs to be easy for a person viewing their credit card bill to know that they paid for something... and not be super weird. I had a buddy who nearly did a chargeback against a club that put "E 11 EVN" on his bill... name is Eleven Club.
- Disruptive_Dave 7y agoMost strip clubs do something like "Sully's Steakhouse" . edit....or so I'm told :)
- arcticbull 7y agoHave they set the MCC to Restaurant too? I have to imagine that triggers bonus categories for dining on credit cards, like the 4X on the Amex Gold and 3X on Sapphire Reserve. That's a heck of a bonus category haha.
- jaywalk 7y agoIt's always Restaurant from my experience, but it's not like you can pay for dances with your credit card. Just food and drinks.
- ta999999171 7y agoI mean, not with that attitude
- bluedino 7y agoCash advance from the on-site ATM with the $15 surcharge
- arcticbull 7y agoA friend told me Gold Club accepts credit for dances haha.
- commandlinefan 7y agoHm - $600 at Sully's Steakhouse... you were the only one there? Ok, sounds reasonable.
- tzs 7y agoThere's an amusing quiz concerning gay bars that sound like steakhouses: http://www.steakhouseorgaybar.com/ http://www.steakhouseorgaybar.com/
- throwaway_tech 7y ago>I had a buddy who nearly did a chargeback against a club that put "E 11 EVN" on his bill... name is Eleven Club. Are you sure the name isn't "Club E11Even"? Because there is a rather famous strip club in Miami named E11Even (pronounced Eleven).
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoOfficial name, yes, but in their advertising, they usually put Eleven...
- yardie 7y agoI'd just like to add E11EVEN is not a strip club. It is in fact a burlesque club. There is some nudity but not in the same way as a strip club. For any Miami-based HNers, you can find me at the nearby bar, you'll know the one.
- throwaway_tech 7y agoGuessing "the corner" bar (probably eating the peppers)...I won't nitpick in typical HN fashion of strip club or not, either way I call it the ballet. But now I'm going to have to go just to take a survey on the issue.
- tedunangst 7y agoIs the corner that great? I wouldn't go out of my way to get there, but maybe I'm missing something?
- throwaway_tech 7y agoTo each their own, its a small dive bar that is generally over crowded with bad service, on the plus side they have good drinks at good prices. But when people say they are at the bar across the street from E11even it means the corner. Its also big for people in the service industry.
- yardie 7y ago
- Cd00d 7y agoI work with credit card data, and I'm always astounded at how much ambiguity the banks allow. We see major brands redact what's in the transaction description to the point where it may only say the street intersection of the transaction (Main & 4th), yet the banks have a call center handling questions like, 'I don't recognize this place and it's a $200 charge, so what was it?'. With simple rules to make the transaction descriptions less opaque, I'd think the banks would come out ahead.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoThere's a good sized market, but IIRC porn payments have an outsized portion of problems, like lots of chargebacks.
- __jal 7y ago> Key feature, must not look suspicious on credit card bill That's called a hotel room.
- vkaku 7y agoMore like 'Hot Coffee at Hotel XXX'. But in all seriousness, imagine using the Apple card for this, and then it comes up with a logo which says exactly what it is, heh :) The best way to tackle that is to own a media company, and have PornHub as one of its' holdings, and then the bill would appear to be a neutral 'Decent Looking Media Inc.' or something like that.
- jandrese 7y agoHoney, why did you spend $400 on hotel coffee?
- bproctor 7y agoThere are a lot of porn friendly payment systems. The big issue is chargebacks and fraud.
- mirekrusin 7y agoFraud has completely different profile on cryptocurrency. They would have zero chargeback percentage. Just think about it.
- spookthesunset 7y ago> They would have zero chargeback percentage. Just think about it. LOL. Great for the shady porn site operators but not at all good for the consumer who has no recourse. A lot of those chargebacks are perfectly valid because the site operator is some shady fly-by-night site doing shady stuff.
- jandrese 7y agoOn the plus side, it's not like they can just grab money out of your wallet with Crypto. You have to initiate the transfer. No "typos" when running your card. No double charges. It actually seems like a valid use case for crypto. Downside is the high fees and/or long waits for the coins to clear.
- mirekrusin 7y agoCryptocurrency exchanges seem to be solving those problems. They transact between participants in thousands per second. Bybit has no fees on deposits/withdrawals (withdrawals can be batched to avoid network fees); but network fees are not a disaster - currently network fees are: a) in 1 block 0.27 USD/tx; b) in 6 blocks 0.10 USD/tx.
- jandrese 7y agoThe fundamental problem with those exchanges is that they are sitting on your wallet. So now you're back to all of the problems with traditional banks. If someone wants to double-charge then it's up to the exchange to prevent it, the blockchain itself doesn't come into play. Worse, a great many exchanges in the past (almost all thus far) have proven to be fraudulent, incompetent, or both.
- spookthesunset 7y agoThere are plenty of porn friendly payment providers. They just cost a lot of money relative to "normal" merchants because of a few simple reasons: 1) Chargebacks -- people chargeback the shit out of these kinds of transactions. Significant other sees the bill, gets pissed / confused about the charge / whatever and gets it charged back. 2) Fraud -- people use stolen CC's to pay for this kind of thing. 3) Porn operators are, as a whole, rather shady themselves and present their own set of risks to a payment provider. A lot of those chargebacks in #1 are actually valid chargebacks. You could say "use bitcoin", which would solve the chargeback problem but do nothing for fraud and shady porn sites. If anything it would exacerbate the shady behavior because consumers would have no recourse against fraud. In short, collecting payment for porn sites a tough, costly business.
- errantspark 7y agoWhat's the percentage of porn-related shadiness is because our society and business culture forces that? It seems similar to drug prohibitions etc. I haven't had to deal with a shady drug dealer in years now that weed is legal. Maybe if vice-clauses and the like weren't so ubiquitous we'd see more upright actors in the field.
- 1000units 7y agoAlmost none of it. Mentally stable people do not want strangers to ejaculate into their mouth on camera for money. Those willing are easily taken advantage of. edit: Many downvotes! Let's hear the dissent. I'll faithfully engage. edit: 'dang, can we please remove flagging privileges from whoever targeted this comment? Thanks.
- noxer 7y agoCrypto? Credit card bill would show whatever exchange people use to buy crypto.
- hindsightbias 7y agoHow about a giftcard system?
- bena 7y agoThe problem is that even if there is an innocuous sounding name, once it gets known as "the porn clearing house", it doesn't matter.
- gnahckire 7y agoThat's essentially what the movie Middle Men was about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Men_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Men_(film)
- uberduber 7y agoHave worked in men's and women's porn. Women have this solved, all their porn is from Amazon. Historically don't chargeback so that hurdle never existed. I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of Kindle revenue and certainly more than half of Kindle profits were just women's porn. Amazon occasionally has half-hearted crackdowns because some conservative finds it and complains.