5 ms·

People in my country don't like creditcards so they are trying to sell their debit cards. In the US,as I understand it, its considered perfectly acceptable for

• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Yes this is correct and there isn’t an alternative. Worse, both MasterCard and Visa also take moral or political positions on what transactions are allowed. For example you may have trouble collecting payments for porn. A more serious example is when they banned donations to Wikileaks in 2010 [link below], as a coordinated action doing the state’s bidding. This was in response to the release of diplomatic cables, which is just plain old journalism. In my opinion, this issue of control and freedom is worse than the transactional cost. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    > moral or political positions It's legal and fraud considerations. You have a toxic mix of fraud risks, money laundering risks, and the potential risk of accidently enabling legally radioactive CSAM when supporting pornography. This is way too much risk to bank an industry that is smaller than most other sectors. In the Wikileaks case, the lack of redaction meant Wikileaks and its enablers could face multiple national security and espionage related charges. That is too much risk. At the end of the day, if you are a payment processor you will have to assume liability for abetting your customers actions. And if you do not moderate well enough, as an executive your head is personally on the line for plenty of civil and even criminal charges.