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> I really wish law enforcement would enfoce laws, and payment processors would process payments. Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime. So financia

> I really wish law enforcement would enfoce laws, and payment processors would process payments. Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime. So financial processors who process payments indiscriminately can find themselves in court for the sins of their clients. Most financial institutions are not willing to bear the expense of legal defense for questionable clientele. Update: This is similar in a lot of ways to the issues Marijuana retailers have with banking: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/why-marijuana-retailers-cant-use-banks https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/...

tw600040 6y ago
SO policing what clients do should be the job of the payment processor instead of police?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  Yes, in the same way it's the job of the bartender to check if there are underaged drinkers in the bar and do their due diligence. Delegation of responsibility is necessary because 1. nobody wants to live in a police state because that's what you need if everything would immediately be escalated to law enforcement, 2. the owner of an establishment has domain knowledge that the police does not have, 3. handing the responsibility over to law enforcement would immediately give law enforcement an excuse to have total access to all private matters, harming everyone else's privacy.
  - McDyver 6y ago
    I believe you're contradicting yourself. In your example, if the underage drinkers pay using MasterCard, then it's MCs job to check, as they're doing to pornhub. MasterCard should stay out of it, as they do in other situations.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      >, if the underage drinkers pay using MasterCard, then it's MCs job to check no, a bartender is always obligated to verify the age of people who enter their establishment if in doubt, regardless of how they pay. You won't get off the hook selling booze to minors because they pay digitally. And that is actually very reasonable for the exact reason I pointed out, if it was MC's responsibility they would have an immediate excuse to snoop into my purchasing history for every minor transaction. (which they already have to a far too large degree).
      - McDyver 6y ago
        Exactly. MasterCard has nothing to do with verifying the legality of the transaction - pornhub, or whoever, should do their due diligence to validate everything is legal.
        notyourday 6y ago
        Facebook Reddit Instagram Vimeo Snapchat CashApp Venmo Every single one of these companies has trafficking minors problem. All of them dwarf pornhub's.
      - UnFleshedOne 6y ago
        Aren't you contradicting yourself? In this case pornhub is the bartender, and MC is MC. Here we have a few underage drinkers tricking or convincing a bartender to pour a drink, and MC is stopping payment processing for the bar and you agree that's the right thing?
        Barrin92 6y ago
        No, I'm not contradicting myself, I'm saying the level of authority should be appropriate to the issue at hand. Child abuse apparently widespread enough to go beyond Pornhub's already existing moderation implies some responsibility for the payment processors, and also at the end of the day responsibility of the law enforcement. What I'm saying is there is no division of labour in the sense of outsourcing everything to law enforcement, or everything to Pornhub.
  - wcoenen 6y ago
    Applying your own bartender analogy, in this case pornhub should be properly policing the content made available on their website. Mastercard doesn't have any useful domain knowledge.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      They should (as far as they can), and Mastercard should take responsibility as far as they can. Both should take appropriate levels of responsibility given the capacity and scope that they have. I assume Pornhub already does try to directly address child abuse that is obvious from the content, I assume Mastercard can go further and identify child abuse based on known entities in their payment system, and so on. And if both fail, they should delegate information upwards, but only then.
      - Spooky23 6y ago
        Porn isn’t business any processor wants to be publicly associated with. If there’s evidence that the site isn’t policing itself, they are gone.
        ogre_codes 6y ago
        MC & Visa do business with thousands (millions?) of adult shops in the US. They have no moral compass or concerns about being involved in financial transactions with porn purveyors. They do have a tremendous aversion to people involved in criminal activity or at high risk of doing so. Once PH started publicly flirting with that threshold they got dumped.
        Spooky23 6y ago
        The morality police are the police. It's a different scope. Porn shops sell product in one place and local authorities deal with that. A bigger entity with interstate impact is a federal matter and penalties are much more severe.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
- kasey_junk 6y ago
  Maybe it shouldn’t be but the laws currently on the books makes some enforcement the payment processors job.
- mfer 6y ago
  If one is unaware of a customer performing illegal activities it's one thing. That may even be a legal defense that works. But, if you are aware of a customer using your service to perform illegal activities you can't claim plausible deniability.
- pradn 6y ago
  A company should comply with laws. Shutting off payments processing to possibly-illegal clients is a way to prevent potential litigation, which may result in high penalties. This is the corporate legal framework at work. If you want a company to not have this option, you need to 1) absolve them of the responsibility to know their clients 2) prevent them from arbitrarily cutting off access. If you don't absolve them, it doesn't make sense to prevent them from cutting off access - how else can they comply with their legal responsibilities?
- save_ferris 6y ago
  Not instead of, in addition to. This is no different than expecting employees of a daycare to report criminal activity involving children to the police, or expecting startup employees to report cases of fraud (like in the case of Theranos). It's not reasonable to expect police to be watching everyone all the time.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Another example. If you tell anyone at a school (public or private) or a psychiatric professional that you have intent to harm yourself or others they are also required to report it.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      They're required to report it, not expel you from school. MasterCard could similarly report these alleged (alleged!) crimes, while still processing their payments, and avoid damaging someone's business without due process.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    No, that's not the same at all. MasterCard could report PornHub to the police and still keep them as a customer. The police (well, FBI, probably) could decide what to do from there. They might investigate and find that PH isn't violating any laws. Or maybe they are, and get fined or some of their employees prosecuted. Either way, "this company is doing crimes" should have nothing to do with whether or not they can be MasterCard's customer. (Ignoring, for a second, KYC-type laws that can make MC criminally liable for not policing their own platform... laws I think are mostly garbage.) Your analogy doesn't fit, because the current scenario (MC kicking PH off their platform) would be like if a daycare discovered criminal activity involving one of the kids they watch and then refused to watch the kid anymore. (Which would be a bad thing that might make the kid less safe!)
    - save_ferris 6y ago
      Doesn't a business have the right to decide who they get to do business with? If a business sees a customer doing something they're not comfortable with, don't they have a right to refuse service?
- misterbwong 6y ago
  False equivalence. Regulating what happens on your own private platform to ensure compliance with applicable laws is, and always has been, the job of the platform owner. It is not realistic to expect law enforcement to check every platform for compliance under every law. Even if MC would ultimately win in court, litigation is not cheap and the brand damage alone would be massive. MC is a massive, trusted financial household name. They would be very publicly fighting for their right to knowingly process payments for a company that is serving illegal sex videos on the largest porn website in the world. I do not envy the PR agency that would be tasked to spin that one.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  No. The payment processor just needs to not commit crimes. It's also a crime for an individual to aid and abet the commission of a crime. That obviously doesn't mean "it's my job to police the behavior of every person I come into contact with."
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  You are mistaking the intent of my comment. I was explaining why banks stay well clear of anything which might be criminal. Whether that is how things should be from an ethical or societal standpoint is a separate question. Pornhub itself could use a similar defense to what you suggest. Is it their job to police the content instead of the police? If they were hosting content with minors and rape (and it seems highly likely they were), they were profiting from illegal activities. I'm on the fence. At some point the law should hold people who profit from hurting people liable. While Master Card (or PornHub) were not necessarily active participants here, they both profited from criminal activity. Where you draw the line is tough.
simongr3dal 6y ago
How would you know that the activity was criminal before it has been judged in a court?
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  You can’t always know. That’s why places like PayPal are very heavy handed and over the top with fraud detection. It’s being proactive (whether for good or not).
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > How would you know that the activity was criminal before it has been judged in a court? You don't! That's where it all gets weird. There is beyond a doubt a massive amount of illegal activity that flows through MasterCard transactions, but MasterCard can't reasonably detect all of it. But when there is a case like this where your dirty laundry is big public news, suddenly MC can't hide behind plausible deniability.
lmilcin 6y ago
> Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime. Yes, it can, but the question is who is going to decide it. Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal. I am pretty sure that Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon they somewhere fund or support knowingly or unknowingly some kind of criminal activity. That doesn't seem to be a problem for payment processors, though. Neither is a problem that some funky stuff shows on Youtube from time to time which is promptly taken down when somebody reports it. The question is whether PH did this knowingly and whether it is Mastercard's responsibility to act on it and how much of this is realy up to Mastercard to judge. If PH is taking down any content that is reported and deactivating accounts then that is basically the same thing as Youtube does and we are now in gray territory when PH is being punished for not being to Mastercard's liking for some reason.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Yes, it can, but the question is who is going to decide it. Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal. Normally what will happen is if the assistance in money laundering or funding criminal activity is incidental or the organization didn't know there was a problem and couldn't be reasonably expected to know, then it's not a crime. But if the organization knows or should have known, then it is. MasterCard is now in the knows or should have known state, so continuing to fund illegal activity could reasonably be considered a crime, at least based on the typical patterns of these laws.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    The question is then who is doing criminal activity? Is PornHub liable because couple users sneaked something that is illegal? Or is there something we are not aware of and PornHub engaged in it? There is no information on that. If it is the case that only minority of users are responsible then Youtube is likewise liable and Mastercard should stop serving Youtube knowing that at any point in time Youtube has some users that have illegal content. It is different to stop payments for illegal activity and stopping payments to a large corporation that has huge user base that has some users engaging in illegal activity. If it is ok to do that then practically no current large company that has large user base could be served by payment organizations.
tw600040 6y ago
//Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime Depends on what you mean by funding. If payment processor like Mastercard is considered 'funding', so does the 'treasury' if cash is used. the factory that printed the currency bill too? how far do you really want to go with this?
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I worded that poorly. I posted a link above which helps explain it above since a few people had questions about this. Fundamentally, if you perform banking activities for criminal activities you open yourself up to a landslide of legal bullshit. Banks want to be as far from that as possible.
at-fates-hands 6y ago
>> Most financial institutions are not willing to bear the expense of legal defense for questionable clientele. Which is why banks won't do businesses with legal cannabis dispensaries since on a federal level, its still illegal. Legalizing cannabis at the federal level would give a large number of dispensaries some relief from this federal oversight of the banking laws.
dathinab 6y ago
> Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime. Yes, but they don't fund crime. They just allow transactions between customers and sellers. Especially in this case I think it's more appropriate if: - the payment provider reports to the police - the police is properly founded and equipped to handle such cases (hint it isn't in most countries I'm aware of). - If after a initial short "check" the police believes a deeper investigation is adequate the payment provider might have to suspend service (temporary with time limited and telling the porn company why). I thing this would be much more appropriate. Furthermore: Requiring manual review of pron material and reasonable proof of consent/age if it's not obvious from the video.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Yes, but they don't fund crime. They just allow transactions between customers and sellers. No, they are not funding it, my wording was far from perfect. This is very very similar to why Marijuana retailers have trouble with banking. There are a lot of laws around banking and criminal activity which make banks very averse to dealing with anything that remotely smells criminal. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/why-marijuana-retailers-cant-use-banks https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/...
rualca 6y ago
> Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime. Is processing payments between two entities equivalent to funding them? For example, is the post office funding someone if he sends them a letter with cash or a check?

tw600040 6y ago

SO policing what clients do should be the job of the payment processor instead of police?

Barrin92 6y ago
Yes, in the same way it's the job of the bartender to check if there are underaged drinkers in the bar and do their due diligence. Delegation of responsibility is necessary because 1. nobody wants to live in a police state because that's what you need if everything would immediately be escalated to law enforcement, 2. the owner of an establishment has domain knowledge that the police does not have, 3. handing the responsibility over to law enforcement would immediately give law enforcement an excuse to have total access to all private matters, harming everyone else's privacy.
- McDyver 6y ago
  I believe you're contradicting yourself. In your example, if the underage drinkers pay using MasterCard, then it's MCs job to check, as they're doing to pornhub. MasterCard should stay out of it, as they do in other situations.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >, if the underage drinkers pay using MasterCard, then it's MCs job to check no, a bartender is always obligated to verify the age of people who enter their establishment if in doubt, regardless of how they pay. You won't get off the hook selling booze to minors because they pay digitally. And that is actually very reasonable for the exact reason I pointed out, if it was MC's responsibility they would have an immediate excuse to snoop into my purchasing history for every minor transaction. (which they already have to a far too large degree).
    - McDyver 6y ago
      Exactly. MasterCard has nothing to do with verifying the legality of the transaction - pornhub, or whoever, should do their due diligence to validate everything is legal.
      - notyourday 6y ago
        Facebook Reddit Instagram Vimeo Snapchat CashApp Venmo Every single one of these companies has trafficking minors problem. All of them dwarf pornhub's.
    - UnFleshedOne 6y ago
      Aren't you contradicting yourself? In this case pornhub is the bartender, and MC is MC. Here we have a few underage drinkers tricking or convincing a bartender to pour a drink, and MC is stopping payment processing for the bar and you agree that's the right thing?
      - Barrin92 6y ago
        No, I'm not contradicting myself, I'm saying the level of authority should be appropriate to the issue at hand. Child abuse apparently widespread enough to go beyond Pornhub's already existing moderation implies some responsibility for the payment processors, and also at the end of the day responsibility of the law enforcement. What I'm saying is there is no division of labour in the sense of outsourcing everything to law enforcement, or everything to Pornhub.
- wcoenen 6y ago
  Applying your own bartender analogy, in this case pornhub should be properly policing the content made available on their website. Mastercard doesn't have any useful domain knowledge.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    They should (as far as they can), and Mastercard should take responsibility as far as they can. Both should take appropriate levels of responsibility given the capacity and scope that they have. I assume Pornhub already does try to directly address child abuse that is obvious from the content, I assume Mastercard can go further and identify child abuse based on known entities in their payment system, and so on. And if both fail, they should delegate information upwards, but only then.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      Porn isn’t business any processor wants to be publicly associated with. If there’s evidence that the site isn’t policing itself, they are gone.
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        MC & Visa do business with thousands (millions?) of adult shops in the US. They have no moral compass or concerns about being involved in financial transactions with porn purveyors. They do have a tremendous aversion to people involved in criminal activity or at high risk of doing so. Once PH started publicly flirting with that threshold they got dumped.
        Spooky23 6y ago
        The morality police are the police. It's a different scope. Porn shops sell product in one place and local authorities deal with that. A bigger entity with interstate impact is a federal matter and penalties are much more severe.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
kasey_junk 6y ago
Maybe it shouldn’t be but the laws currently on the books makes some enforcement the payment processors job.
mfer 6y ago
If one is unaware of a customer performing illegal activities it's one thing. That may even be a legal defense that works. But, if you are aware of a customer using your service to perform illegal activities you can't claim plausible deniability.
pradn 6y ago
A company should comply with laws. Shutting off payments processing to possibly-illegal clients is a way to prevent potential litigation, which may result in high penalties. This is the corporate legal framework at work. If you want a company to not have this option, you need to 1) absolve them of the responsibility to know their clients 2) prevent them from arbitrarily cutting off access. If you don't absolve them, it doesn't make sense to prevent them from cutting off access - how else can they comply with their legal responsibilities?
save_ferris 6y ago
Not instead of, in addition to. This is no different than expecting employees of a daycare to report criminal activity involving children to the police, or expecting startup employees to report cases of fraud (like in the case of Theranos). It's not reasonable to expect police to be watching everyone all the time.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Another example. If you tell anyone at a school (public or private) or a psychiatric professional that you have intent to harm yourself or others they are also required to report it.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    They're required to report it, not expel you from school. MasterCard could similarly report these alleged (alleged!) crimes, while still processing their payments, and avoid damaging someone's business without due process.
- kelnos 6y ago
  No, that's not the same at all. MasterCard could report PornHub to the police and still keep them as a customer. The police (well, FBI, probably) could decide what to do from there. They might investigate and find that PH isn't violating any laws. Or maybe they are, and get fined or some of their employees prosecuted. Either way, "this company is doing crimes" should have nothing to do with whether or not they can be MasterCard's customer. (Ignoring, for a second, KYC-type laws that can make MC criminally liable for not policing their own platform... laws I think are mostly garbage.) Your analogy doesn't fit, because the current scenario (MC kicking PH off their platform) would be like if a daycare discovered criminal activity involving one of the kids they watch and then refused to watch the kid anymore. (Which would be a bad thing that might make the kid less safe!)
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    Doesn't a business have the right to decide who they get to do business with? If a business sees a customer doing something they're not comfortable with, don't they have a right to refuse service?
misterbwong 6y ago
False equivalence. Regulating what happens on your own private platform to ensure compliance with applicable laws is, and always has been, the job of the platform owner. It is not realistic to expect law enforcement to check every platform for compliance under every law. Even if MC would ultimately win in court, litigation is not cheap and the brand damage alone would be massive. MC is a massive, trusted financial household name. They would be very publicly fighting for their right to knowingly process payments for a company that is serving illegal sex videos on the largest porn website in the world. I do not envy the PR agency that would be tasked to spin that one.
tshaddox 6y ago
No. The payment processor just needs to not commit crimes. It's also a crime for an individual to aid and abet the commission of a crime. That obviously doesn't mean "it's my job to police the behavior of every person I come into contact with."
ogre_codes 6y ago
You are mistaking the intent of my comment. I was explaining why banks stay well clear of anything which might be criminal. Whether that is how things should be from an ethical or societal standpoint is a separate question. Pornhub itself could use a similar defense to what you suggest. Is it their job to police the content instead of the police? If they were hosting content with minors and rape (and it seems highly likely they were), they were profiting from illegal activities. I'm on the fence. At some point the law should hold people who profit from hurting people liable. While Master Card (or PornHub) were not necessarily active participants here, they both profited from criminal activity. Where you draw the line is tough.

simongr3dal 6y ago

How would you know that the activity was criminal before it has been judged in a court?

colejohnson66 6y ago
You can’t always know. That’s why places like PayPal are very heavy handed and over the top with fraud detection. It’s being proactive (whether for good or not).
ogre_codes 6y ago
> How would you know that the activity was criminal before it has been judged in a court? You don't! That's where it all gets weird. There is beyond a doubt a massive amount of illegal activity that flows through MasterCard transactions, but MasterCard can't reasonably detect all of it. But when there is a case like this where your dirty laundry is big public news, suddenly MC can't hide behind plausible deniability.

lmilcin 6y ago

> Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime. Yes, it can, but the question is who is going to decide it. Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal. I am pretty sure that Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon they somewhere fund or support knowingly or unknowingly some kind of criminal activity. That doesn't seem to be a problem for payment processors, though. Neither is a problem that some funky stuff shows on Youtube from time to time which is promptly taken down when somebody reports it. The question is whether PH did this knowingly and whether it is Mastercard's responsibility to act on it and how much of this is realy up to Mastercard to judge. If PH is taking down any content that is reported and deactivating accounts then that is basically the same thing as Youtube does and we are now in gray territory when PH is being punished for not being to Mastercard's liking for some reason.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
Yes, it can, but the question is who is going to decide it. Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal. Normally what will happen is if the assistance in money laundering or funding criminal activity is incidental or the organization didn't know there was a problem and couldn't be reasonably expected to know, then it's not a crime. But if the organization knows or should have known, then it is. MasterCard is now in the knows or should have known state, so continuing to fund illegal activity could reasonably be considered a crime, at least based on the typical patterns of these laws.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  The question is then who is doing criminal activity? Is PornHub liable because couple users sneaked something that is illegal? Or is there something we are not aware of and PornHub engaged in it? There is no information on that. If it is the case that only minority of users are responsible then Youtube is likewise liable and Mastercard should stop serving Youtube knowing that at any point in time Youtube has some users that have illegal content. It is different to stop payments for illegal activity and stopping payments to a large corporation that has huge user base that has some users engaging in illegal activity. If it is ok to do that then practically no current large company that has large user base could be served by payment organizations.

tw600040 6y ago

//Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime Depends on what you mean by funding. If payment processor like Mastercard is considered 'funding', so does the 'treasury' if cash is used. the factory that printed the currency bill too? how far do you really want to go with this?

ogre_codes 6y ago
I worded that poorly. I posted a link above which helps explain it above since a few people had questions about this. Fundamentally, if you perform banking activities for criminal activities you open yourself up to a landslide of legal bullshit. Banks want to be as far from that as possible.

at-fates-hands 6y ago

>> Most financial institutions are not willing to bear the expense of legal defense for questionable clientele. Which is why banks won't do businesses with legal cannabis dispensaries since on a federal level, its still illegal. Legalizing cannabis at the federal level would give a large number of dispensaries some relief from this federal oversight of the banking laws.

dathinab 6y ago

> Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime. Yes, but they don't fund crime. They just allow transactions between customers and sellers. Especially in this case I think it's more appropriate if: - the payment provider reports to the police - the police is properly founded and equipped to handle such cases (hint it isn't in most countries I'm aware of). - If after a initial short "check" the police believes a deeper investigation is adequate the payment provider might have to suspend service (temporary with time limited and telling the porn company why). I thing this would be much more appropriate. Furthermore: Requiring manual review of pron material and reasonable proof of consent/age if it's not obvious from the video.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ogre_codes 6y ago
> Yes, but they don't fund crime. They just allow transactions between customers and sellers. No, they are not funding it, my wording was far from perfect. This is very very similar to why Marijuana retailers have trouble with banking. There are a lot of laws around banking and criminal activity which make banks very averse to dealing with anything that remotely smells criminal. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/why-marijuana-retailers-cant-use-banks https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/...

rualca 6y ago

> Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime. Is processing payments between two entities equivalent to funding them? For example, is the post office funding someone if he sends them a letter with cash or a check?