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Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing p

Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing pretty quickly. We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem. Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe informs us we're going to be deplatformed because Wells Fargo (their banking partner) had reviewed our account (apparently because of its volume) and determined we violated their standards because of the nature of the toys. We did a bit of back and forth where Stripe suggested we alter the colors available (seriously) to assuage Wells Fargo's puritanical concerns, and Stripe insisted it wasn't _their_ moralizing, but rather Wells Fargo (paragons of fucking virtue as they are), but we weren't willing to compromise on the nature of our product or have our product's options or colors dictated to us by one of the most corrupt banks on the planet. We ended up deplatforming and moving to a high-risk processor who was willing to match our competitive Stripe rate. That processor sucks and their fraud protections are weak and their interface is garbage, but they're not telling us how to run our business. Was mostly disappointed that we went through an arduous review process with Stripe beforehand and received assurances we'd be fine since our chargeback rate is insanely low and we ship actual physical product and have no nudity on our site, but alas.

lovegoblin 6y ago
Unfortunately exactly 0% of this story surprises me. > That processor sucks and their fraud protections are weak and their interface is garbage I have three guesses and they're all CCBill.
- telaandrews2 6y ago
  LOLZ I was waiting for someone to call them out. I haven't looked at their interface in decades, but last time I looked it was decades out of date. Payments is the most profitable niche in the porn industry.
  - lovegoblin 6y ago
    I assure you it hasn't improved.
DebtDeflation 6y ago
>where Stripe suggested we alter the colors available What? Like flesh colored was ok but definitely not green ones or something?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- discardable_dan 6y ago
  I'd guess the opposite, from the story.
- disillusioned 6y ago
  The inverse of this. Here's their exact, hilarious wording: >Our banking partners recently notified us that they are no longer willing to support the sales of realistic sex toys. I understand that your products were designed to depict the body parts of mythological and fantastical creatures, and we have indicated this to our banking partners in an effort to advocate for continuing to support your business here on Stripe. As a result of these discussions, our banking partners have agreed that they are willing to continue supporting your business as long as you are not selling products that are colored such that they might be mistaken for human flesh.
  - koolba 6y ago
    You should tell them to judge mythological sex toys not by the color of their skin, but by the context of their character.
  - toxik 6y ago
    Wow, this is hysterical! A bank saying no to honest money because it’s sex toys, not even that, because it’s sex toys looking like human genitalia, — no not even that, because the toys are skin colored! I wonder if this would ever happen in Europe. I somehow feel that we’re more... open to these things. Do you know about Klarna?
    - nolok 6y ago
rcarrigan87 6y ago
This is the best thing I've read all week.
partiallypro 6y ago
We had a client that is a big strip club in the area that started selling t-shirts with the name of the club...Stripe banned it just a few months after launch.
kennydude 6y ago
Apparently now the rules are no adult things, or anything moderately related to adult content now, Real pain because Stripe are one of the better providers to integrate with :(
fpgaminer 6y ago
Thank you for sharing your experience. It absolutely disgusts me the power that payment processors have over businesses. The sooner that industry is dismantled and made agnostic the better. I remember watching some BDSM website's documentary where they talked about how their payment processor dictated the kind of content they were allowed to make. It boggles my mind that people are okay with that. I also find it surprising the amount of back bending people will do to say that payment processors are only doing it because the transactions are high risk. Your story, the thousands of other public stories, and the payment processors themselves have made it absolutely clear that it isn't about the transaction risk. It's them imposing their religious beliefs upon others. With sex being such a huge part of our lives, why aren't we bending out backs to _help_ the sex industry thrive, instead of defending corrupt oligopolies?
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> _help_ the sex industry thrive There are dark sides. It is not the friendly industry oft portrayed. It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive. It is regulated because it needs to be. Most common complaint heard by lawyers in the field: "I did the shoot, the movie is on the website, but I haven't been paid." Followed worryingly by: "They said I had to because I had signed a contract." The advice I give to anyone going to work on their first porn shoot: Bring a friend. Someone older, with a car, who will be on the set with you at all times.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive. Some of it maybe. But not the toy selling business being discussed.
  - fpgaminer 6y ago
    I would contest that if the industry wasn't demonized it wouldn't have a dark side.
    - sandworm101 6y ago
haltingproblem 6y ago
This is an incredibly frustrating read. I know, I know there are far worse things in the world but fucking Wells Fargo dictating to people when they evict homeowners who have no relationship with Wells Fargo, commit wholesale wire fraud, destroy people's credit and then turn around and lecture a honest business. This is why banking is a rent-seeking and though we need the financial industry they are ghoulish vampires sucking the lifeblood out of everything they touch. /rant
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Where there is a lot of money on the table to be had, there will be psychopaths.
- disillusioned 6y ago
  This was my exact rant. Even more galling was that Wells Fargo was virtue signaling about something that... had no optics to them. Literally no one knows who our payment processor was, but if you even got as far as "Stripe," a _vanishingly small_ number of people know that Wells Fargo is their banking partner for US transactions. This isn't to suggest that WF should run their merchant processing business with no one watching for fraudulent or wantonly scam transactions, but to step in out of nowhere because the volume of actual real charges for real customers for real products was too high and you were busy clutching your pearls over what was being sold is just insane. As if it could somehow splash back on to Wells Fargo and, what, further sully their reputation? "Sure they may ruin people's lives and spawn fake accounts to hit numbers and silence anyone who speaks up and evict people incorrectly but at least they don't process transactions for flesh colored fantasy sex toys. That, sir, would be a bridge too far."
  - Le0n_ 6y ago
    I think you're misinterpreting the scale of Wellsfargo. The CEO probably doesn't even know what onlyfans is, and they manage almost 2 trillion dollars.
    - thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
dataisfun 6y ago
I love how Wells Fargo, which was nabbed for a massive wide ranging scam / fraud, gets to be all sanctimonious about ethics or standards.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That is the function of puritanism. Consider it as a product: Want to look or feel virtuous even though you are a horrible selfish person? Are you not openly having sex with more than one person? With prudity you are qualified! It works by reducing virtue into who you have sex with there by freeing you to commit crimes while considering yourself righteous and decent! Order today!
fock 6y ago
so sad that wirecard went down, then you could have had a clean german fintech... oh wait.
spacephysics 6y ago
That’s ridiculous, sorry to hear that. I think there’s hope with decentralized payment systems (whatever/whichever they end up being, be it crypto, or some other mechanism) where digital payments can occur without the needed approval of any centralized vendor. Sadly mass adoption is a bit more distant.
bb88 6y ago
What I'm curious about is whether or not OnlyFans has bribed off Wells Fargo -- I mean it could be in a legal way for financial services that are non existent. In other words, Stripe allows OnlyFans because Wells Fargo has been bought off on the side. Ergo, Wells Fargo doesn't complain anymore. How much would that need to be with Wells Fargo? 10 million per year? 50 million? Does OnlyFans make enough to afford 100 million per year?
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  I read this on some legit news site a few days ago: apparently Bella Thorne, a formed Disney actress-turned-pornstar(?) joined OnlyFans and hit $1m in 24 hours. I don't follow OnlyFans progress and I have no idea how many "content creators" they got and what is the "fanbase", but if a 20yo nobody with a nice body can take $1m in 24h (then I assume that is with 1-3-6-... months subscriptions)(so she won't bring in another $1m the next day as well). OnlyFans keeps 15-20-25%? And Stripe/WF share a 1-2%? And OnlyFans has 10-20 people of that "caliber" like Mrs Thorne? They won't complain for a long time. I assume that the OP writing about millions, he/she means revenue, not Stripe/WF profits from the fees. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/26/entertainment/bella-thorne-only-fans-trnd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/26/entertainment/bella-thorn... Edit: I couldn't remember the site, I DuckDuckGo-ed and this piece of news appears in many sites, I chose CNN as I didn't recognize most other "celebrity news" sites.
  - lovegoblin 6y ago
    lmao Bella Thorne is not a "20yo nobody". She had tens of millions of followers before joining OnlyFans.
    - esrauch 6y ago
      I think "nobody" was relative here. I had never heard of her before this thread and looking at her career she isn't a nobody but she is very far from being an A-lister.
      - 6y ago
simias 6y ago
I don't really understand the motivation behind this puritanism. I get why respectable institutions don't want to touch things like selling weed or prostitution since that's not legal everywhere and they could get in trouble. But sex toys? Who cares? Like, that's not a rhetorical question, literally "who cares?" Are people going to stop using Wells Fargo because they very indirectly help in the commerce of sex toys?
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  A conservative, evangelical Christian answer would probably be something like "the point is to please each other, and sex toys are about pleasing yourself" or "sex toys encourage masturbation, which is a sin." Then you'd point out that many sex toys are meant for partners to use together, and they might reply back "ah, but Genesis says that husband and wife should be one flesh, not flesh and plastic" but would probably ultimate agree that sex toys, when used exclusively between a cis-male and cis-female, married couple, could be not sinful in some circumstances. A cynic would probably say that, like many such issues, it's ultimately about maintaining control over women.
- chki 6y ago
  I would guess that yes, they are actually worried about certain religious groups no longer doing business with them because they "support" "immoral" practices.
- rmrfrmrf 6y ago
  Alabama, Georgia, and Texas have laws restricting the sale and possession of sex toys.
  - lvturner 6y ago
    Seriously? I'm genuinely mind blown by this. What are the ownership restrictions? Is it blanket or just to certain categories or sizes of toys?
    - tclancy 6y ago
ralston3 6y ago
Wow. Thanks for sharing
throwawaysea 6y ago
We need all platform providers, such as payment utilities, to stop bringing their personal morals and politics to the table. If not, we need to regulate them or build government provided equivalents that don’t have the same vulnerabilities or split them up on anti trust grounds.
- ultrarunner 6y ago
  I'm not sure it's a given that "government provided equivalents" would be less political (or culturally slow-moving, as it were) than the situation now. I also had not considered that the banking sector is lightly regulated. Are you suggesting a re-envisioning of the banking sector as a sort of public utility?
downandout 6y ago
Out of curiosity...what merchant processor do you use now? Have they imposed a rolling reserve, and if so, how much and how long is it?
ashtonkem 6y ago
Seriously? Colors? What colors were beyond the pale (pun intended) for them?
anonu 6y ago
Username checks out...
codegeek 6y ago
Looks like we need a Stripe for high risk industry ?
jgalt212 6y ago
> Stripe insisted it wasn't _their_ moralizing, but rather Wells Fargo (paragons of fucking virtue as they are), very few people or orgs have principles. What they say are principles turn out to be just a blob of preferences that change with the direction of the wind. And quite frankly, Stripe is big enough these days to push back hard against Wells Fargo, if they really wanted to. Wells Fargo definitely does not want to lose the Stripe account. As most things in life there is shared responsibility there.
NotASithLord 6y ago
Can I ask who this high-risk processor is?

lovegoblin 6y ago

Unfortunately exactly 0% of this story surprises me. > That processor sucks and their fraud protections are weak and their interface is garbage I have three guesses and they're all CCBill.

telaandrews2 6y ago
LOLZ I was waiting for someone to call them out. I haven't looked at their interface in decades, but last time I looked it was decades out of date. Payments is the most profitable niche in the porn industry.
- lovegoblin 6y ago
  I assure you it hasn't improved.

DebtDeflation 6y ago

>where Stripe suggested we alter the colors available What? Like flesh colored was ok but definitely not green ones or something?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
discardable_dan 6y ago
I'd guess the opposite, from the story.
disillusioned 6y ago
The inverse of this. Here's their exact, hilarious wording: >Our banking partners recently notified us that they are no longer willing to support the sales of realistic sex toys. I understand that your products were designed to depict the body parts of mythological and fantastical creatures, and we have indicated this to our banking partners in an effort to advocate for continuing to support your business here on Stripe. As a result of these discussions, our banking partners have agreed that they are willing to continue supporting your business as long as you are not selling products that are colored such that they might be mistaken for human flesh.
- koolba 6y ago
  You should tell them to judge mythological sex toys not by the color of their skin, but by the context of their character.
- toxik 6y ago
  Wow, this is hysterical! A bank saying no to honest money because it’s sex toys, not even that, because it’s sex toys looking like human genitalia, — no not even that, because the toys are skin colored! I wonder if this would ever happen in Europe. I somehow feel that we’re more... open to these things. Do you know about Klarna?
  - nolok 6y ago

rcarrigan87 6y ago

This is the best thing I've read all week.

partiallypro 6y ago

We had a client that is a big strip club in the area that started selling t-shirts with the name of the club...Stripe banned it just a few months after launch.

kennydude 6y ago

Apparently now the rules are no adult things, or anything moderately related to adult content now, Real pain because Stripe are one of the better providers to integrate with :(

fpgaminer 6y ago

Thank you for sharing your experience. It absolutely disgusts me the power that payment processors have over businesses. The sooner that industry is dismantled and made agnostic the better. I remember watching some BDSM website's documentary where they talked about how their payment processor dictated the kind of content they were allowed to make. It boggles my mind that people are okay with that. I also find it surprising the amount of back bending people will do to say that payment processors are only doing it because the transactions are high risk. Your story, the thousands of other public stories, and the payment processors themselves have made it absolutely clear that it isn't about the transaction risk. It's them imposing their religious beliefs upon others. With sex being such a huge part of our lives, why aren't we bending out backs to _help_ the sex industry thrive, instead of defending corrupt oligopolies?

sandworm101 6y ago
>> _help_ the sex industry thrive There are dark sides. It is not the friendly industry oft portrayed. It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive. It is regulated because it needs to be. Most common complaint heard by lawyers in the field: "I did the shoot, the movie is on the website, but I haven't been paid." Followed worryingly by: "They said I had to because I had signed a contract." The advice I give to anyone going to work on their first porn shoot: Bring a friend. Someone older, with a car, who will be on the set with you at all times.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive. Some of it maybe. But not the toy selling business being discussed.
- fpgaminer 6y ago
  I would contest that if the industry wasn't demonized it wouldn't have a dark side.
  - sandworm101 6y ago

haltingproblem 6y ago

This is an incredibly frustrating read. I know, I know there are far worse things in the world but fucking Wells Fargo dictating to people when they evict homeowners who have no relationship with Wells Fargo, commit wholesale wire fraud, destroy people's credit and then turn around and lecture a honest business. This is why banking is a rent-seeking and though we need the financial industry they are ghoulish vampires sucking the lifeblood out of everything they touch. /rant

quickthrower2 6y ago
Where there is a lot of money on the table to be had, there will be psychopaths.
disillusioned 6y ago
This was my exact rant. Even more galling was that Wells Fargo was virtue signaling about something that... had no optics to them. Literally no one knows who our payment processor was, but if you even got as far as "Stripe," a _vanishingly small_ number of people know that Wells Fargo is their banking partner for US transactions. This isn't to suggest that WF should run their merchant processing business with no one watching for fraudulent or wantonly scam transactions, but to step in out of nowhere because the volume of actual real charges for real customers for real products was too high and you were busy clutching your pearls over what was being sold is just insane. As if it could somehow splash back on to Wells Fargo and, what, further sully their reputation? "Sure they may ruin people's lives and spawn fake accounts to hit numbers and silence anyone who speaks up and evict people incorrectly but at least they don't process transactions for flesh colored fantasy sex toys. That, sir, would be a bridge too far."
- Le0n_ 6y ago
  I think you're misinterpreting the scale of Wellsfargo. The CEO probably doesn't even know what onlyfans is, and they manage almost 2 trillion dollars.
  - thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago

dataisfun 6y ago

I love how Wells Fargo, which was nabbed for a massive wide ranging scam / fraud, gets to be all sanctimonious about ethics or standards.

Nasrudith 6y ago
That is the function of puritanism. Consider it as a product: Want to look or feel virtuous even though you are a horrible selfish person? Are you not openly having sex with more than one person? With prudity you are qualified! It works by reducing virtue into who you have sex with there by freeing you to commit crimes while considering yourself righteous and decent! Order today!

fock 6y ago

so sad that wirecard went down, then you could have had a clean german fintech... oh wait.

spacephysics 6y ago

That’s ridiculous, sorry to hear that. I think there’s hope with decentralized payment systems (whatever/whichever they end up being, be it crypto, or some other mechanism) where digital payments can occur without the needed approval of any centralized vendor. Sadly mass adoption is a bit more distant.

bb88 6y ago

What I'm curious about is whether or not OnlyFans has bribed off Wells Fargo -- I mean it could be in a legal way for financial services that are non existent. In other words, Stripe allows OnlyFans because Wells Fargo has been bought off on the side. Ergo, Wells Fargo doesn't complain anymore. How much would that need to be with Wells Fargo? 10 million per year? 50 million? Does OnlyFans make enough to afford 100 million per year?

HenryBemis 6y ago
I read this on some legit news site a few days ago: apparently Bella Thorne, a formed Disney actress-turned-pornstar(?) joined OnlyFans and hit $1m in 24 hours. I don't follow OnlyFans progress and I have no idea how many "content creators" they got and what is the "fanbase", but if a 20yo nobody with a nice body can take $1m in 24h (then I assume that is with 1-3-6-... months subscriptions)(so she won't bring in another $1m the next day as well). OnlyFans keeps 15-20-25%? And Stripe/WF share a 1-2%? And OnlyFans has 10-20 people of that "caliber" like Mrs Thorne? They won't complain for a long time. I assume that the OP writing about millions, he/she means revenue, not Stripe/WF profits from the fees. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/26/entertainment/bella-thorne-only-fans-trnd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/26/entertainment/bella-thorn... Edit: I couldn't remember the site, I DuckDuckGo-ed and this piece of news appears in many sites, I chose CNN as I didn't recognize most other "celebrity news" sites.
- lovegoblin 6y ago
  lmao Bella Thorne is not a "20yo nobody". She had tens of millions of followers before joining OnlyFans.
  - esrauch 6y ago
    I think "nobody" was relative here. I had never heard of her before this thread and looking at her career she isn't a nobody but she is very far from being an A-lister.
    - 6y ago

simias 6y ago

I don't really understand the motivation behind this puritanism. I get why respectable institutions don't want to touch things like selling weed or prostitution since that's not legal everywhere and they could get in trouble. But sex toys? Who cares? Like, that's not a rhetorical question, literally "who cares?" Are people going to stop using Wells Fargo because they very indirectly help in the commerce of sex toys?

CobrastanJorji 6y ago
A conservative, evangelical Christian answer would probably be something like "the point is to please each other, and sex toys are about pleasing yourself" or "sex toys encourage masturbation, which is a sin." Then you'd point out that many sex toys are meant for partners to use together, and they might reply back "ah, but Genesis says that husband and wife should be one flesh, not flesh and plastic" but would probably ultimate agree that sex toys, when used exclusively between a cis-male and cis-female, married couple, could be not sinful in some circumstances. A cynic would probably say that, like many such issues, it's ultimately about maintaining control over women.
chki 6y ago
I would guess that yes, they are actually worried about certain religious groups no longer doing business with them because they "support" "immoral" practices.
rmrfrmrf 6y ago
Alabama, Georgia, and Texas have laws restricting the sale and possession of sex toys.
- lvturner 6y ago
  Seriously? I'm genuinely mind blown by this. What are the ownership restrictions? Is it blanket or just to certain categories or sizes of toys?
  - tclancy 6y ago

ralston3 6y ago

Wow. Thanks for sharing

throwawaysea 6y ago

We need all platform providers, such as payment utilities, to stop bringing their personal morals and politics to the table. If not, we need to regulate them or build government provided equivalents that don’t have the same vulnerabilities or split them up on anti trust grounds.

ultrarunner 6y ago
I'm not sure it's a given that "government provided equivalents" would be less political (or culturally slow-moving, as it were) than the situation now. I also had not considered that the banking sector is lightly regulated. Are you suggesting a re-envisioning of the banking sector as a sort of public utility?

downandout 6y ago

Out of curiosity...what merchant processor do you use now? Have they imposed a rolling reserve, and if so, how much and how long is it?

ashtonkem 6y ago

Seriously? Colors? What colors were beyond the pale (pun intended) for them?

anonu 6y ago

Username checks out...

codegeek 6y ago

Looks like we need a Stripe for high risk industry ?

jgalt212 6y ago

> Stripe insisted it wasn't _their_ moralizing, but rather Wells Fargo (paragons of fucking virtue as they are), very few people or orgs have principles. What they say are principles turn out to be just a blob of preferences that change with the direction of the wind. And quite frankly, Stripe is big enough these days to push back hard against Wells Fargo, if they really wanted to. Wells Fargo definitely does not want to lose the Stripe account. As most things in life there is shared responsibility there.

NotASithLord 6y ago

Can I ask who this high-risk processor is?