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Really? The first thing someone does with a stolen credit card is to go pay for porn? I would guess so few people pay for porn willingly that that would be a
by actually_a_dog 5y ago
Really? The first thing someone does with a stolen credit card is to go pay for porn? I would guess so few people pay for porn willingly that that would be a great way to trip all sorts of fraud alarms.
Anecdotally, I had a credit card number get compromised a few years ago. They used it at a Babys-R-Us on the opposite coast. I'm pretty sure they weren't buying porn.
- XorNot 5y agoA stolen credit card number doesn't generally go and "spend big" - they go buy luxury items they want. There's no end of "my credit card got done and they went and spent $50 on gas and beer" stories. At the other side of that there is equally no end of "went and signed up for premium porn content" or PPV cable or whatever - and that's what payment processors tend to get unhappy about. EDIT: Or more accurately, the relative ratio.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoGas, especially. Because you can pay at the pump, you can see if the card is still live without ever seeing a human being. Thieves love that. On the other hand, if the cops were actually interested in prosecuting such things, they left their license plates on the security camera...
- actually_a_dog 5y agoThat makes sense. I've tripped fraud detection alarms on one or another of my cards a few times, and, almost every time I can remember, it was at a gas pump.
- tomatocracy 5y agoI think this is thinking about it backwards. The payment industry are discriminating here on the proportion of payments to porn sites which are fraudulent or disputed, not the proportion of fraudulent or disputed charges which are to porn sites. It can be simultaneously true that the vast majority of fraudulent/disputed payments are not to porn sites and that a very large portion of payments to porn sites are fraudulent or disputed.