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Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to? I get that they don't want to process fraudulent transactions, but
by maxbond 1y ago
Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to? I get that they don't want to process fraudulent transactions, but I'd think the response to a higher percentage of fraud from some industry would be to charge them more. It doesn't make sense to me why they would be concerned about the content of games, as long as everything is legal and the parties concerned aren't subject to sanctions.
Some of these games seem completely abhorrent, and probably illegal in more restrictive jurisdictions, but not the United States. And I've not seen any suggestion they're funding terrorism or something. So I'm perplexed.
- ls612 1y agoThis is one of the ways the government can censor people despite the first amendment. It’s absolutely by design. The regulators “express concern” about certain financial activity and then the companies remove it.
- fragmede 1y agothis is such small potatoes compared to the results of everything going on right now though
- sneak 1y agoNo institutionalized censorship of harmless content is small potatoes.
- fragmede 1y agothe other potatoes are really big
- AngryData 1y agoI don't think so, it is death by a thousand cuts which is why we are in such a shitty place right now. Out rights have been attacked on all side for decades, little by little, but all together it is a huge loss.
- herbst 1y agoThis is a long ongoing issue tho and one of the main reasons many European sex stores don't take credit card at all. Visa and master do enforce irrational morals
- Sniffnoy 1y agoAt least at one time, part of the answer would have been Operation Choke Point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point However, that's clearly not all that's going on -- it doesn't seem like the government is still doing this.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago[flagged]
- arathis 1y agoI’d be pro banning of that shit.
- educasean 1y agoand I'd be against
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y agoHow about GTA5 https://web.archive.org/web/20250122190645/https://www.collectiveshout.org/grand_theft_auto https://web.archive.org/web/20250122190645/https://www.colle... or Detroit Become Human https://xcancel.com/CollectiveShout/status/964663931439480834 https://xcancel.com/CollectiveShout/status/96466393143948083... ?
- ijk 1y agoOne factor is the ongoing campaigns from number of moral crusading groups who lobby them to cut off payment processing for things they don't approve of. NCOSE has been working for decades on the project, and targeting credit card companies has been a successful tactic for them for a decade or so. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/visa-and-mastercard-are-trying-dictate-what-you-can-watch-pornhub https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/visa-and-mastercard-ar... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/why-visa-mastercard-being-blamed-onlyfans-banning-explicit-content-pornography-1621570 https://www.newsweek.com/why-visa-mastercard-being-blamed-on... [3] https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstreams/761eb6c3-9377-4ced-9287-5733293063bf/download https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstreams/761eb6c3-9377-...
- devmor 1y agoAnother factor is the board members and other investors of the institutions themselves. I have been privy to two specific instances where pressure to either ban or reject providing support for specific content was handed down from beyond the executive level at a major financial network player that my client was doing business with.
- SJC_Hacker 1y agoThey tried to do the same to OnlyFans, but lost that battle
- terminalshort 1y agoOnlyfans actually made financial sense, though, because chargeback rates are very high. This move makes no financial sense at all.
- qingcharles 1y agoThis is absolutely not true. OF's chargeback rates are incredibly low. Vastly lower than, say, Amazon. I have this directly from friends who work in this space. Do you have a citation that shows otherwise?
- 1y ago
- markdown 1y agoIt's not just games. Payment processors ban many things that are completely legal, even foods and dietary supplements. It's ridiculous. They have too much power.
- tptacek 1y agoI have no trouble seeing why a payment processor would want to avoid doing business with dietary supplement companies.
- maxbond 1y agoI mean I wouldn't do business with them, I think the supplements industry is infrastructure for grifters, quacks, and pyramid schemes to fleece the desperate, but what's the problem for Visa? Is it a brand safety thing? My presumption would be that payment processors are amoral and have no problem processing payments for Consolidated Baby Kickers if it were legal to do so, is that a misconception?
- cperciva 1y ago"Not as advertised" chargebacks. That industry is also full of subscription scams (e.g. someone thinks they're ordering a supplement for $5.99, but they're actually getting signed up for $39.99/month...).
- fimdomeio 1y agoIf I remember correct from the hot money podcast https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3244 https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3... part of the problem for the credit card companies is figuring what are the boundaries of legality. Countries have very different laws. Things like representing homosexuality or age of consent are very different and credit cards feel that it is a risky business because of that.
- GenerocUsername 1y agoThis makes little sense with even the tiniest amount of probing. This is a solvable geo regulation issue, solvable like many other geo regulatory issues
- noduerme 1y agoMy guess is it's simply a chargeback risk. It's the reason casinos and adult sites have trouble getting credit card processing and are charged much higher basic rates, even under the best of circumstances when the casino or adult site is operating entirely within the law in the jurisdictions it allows. Punters run a lot of chargebacks on casinos, and people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statement will lie and run chargebacks too. In the case of Valve, a lot of chargebacks would drastically increase the processing rates demanded by the payment providers for all transactions across the board, not just those related to adult games. There's probably a great market opportunity here for a game store focused on adult games and willing to take on that risk.
- atomicnumber3 1y agoThat's the problem though. The risk means the market for those riskier credit transactions is literally categorically not a great market. You think JP Morgan gives a shit about Japanese titty games? Hah. No. They care that these games get charged back way more often. If there is a market opportunity, it's probably in a processor for debit-based transactions that are harder to reverse. But then that makes fraud harder to combat, and one of the reasons everyone loves credit cards so much is because consumers are far more confident to buy from random shops if they know they can always get their money back if the shop scams them. So - this whole system's lucratively is entirely predicated on easy credit and low risk meaning low fees. Anyone who wants to play in the mud that's leftover by these companies taking the good business are inherently playing a low margin risky game.
- nerdsniper 1y agoWith the CFPB under threat, there may be room for payment processors which don’t protect consumers from fraud. (Regulation is only as strong as its enforcement)
- mafuy 1y agoMight be a good idea. This is so curious. The US has a weird fetish with privatizing things that the government should handle, like consumer protection. If there were a reasonably robust infrastructure for this outside of payment processors in the US, there would be far less pressure on porn providers to comply with fucked up morals about porn. What we have here is an instance of late stage capitalism, and half the people are too narrowminded to see how it hurts their freedom.
- jimbob45 1y agoI suspect Valve is blaming the credit card companies for something they really wanted for themselves. Steam is a big store open to everyone and you’re going to scare away a big chunk of seniors, Christians, etc with stuff like incest, ageplay, and rape just so that a small minority uses you instead of…itch.io? Better to keep the big safe names like Being a Dik and Eternum on Steam and flush the rest so that you can have the best of both worlds.
- maxbond 1y agoI think that for better or worse Valve is genuinely committed to lassies faire moderation, they have historically been very hesitant to remove really heinous games. I don't think they're using this as cover.
- Dracophoenix 1y agoThat changed with Hatred in 2015. There have been a number of them since. It seems that anything that gives Valve bad press is on its shit list, even if the premise theme has been done before by a bigger or more well-known company stateside. If the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game has full frontal nudity and realistically depicted sex scenes, I doubt Valve would give it a second look.
- maxbond 1y agoThat was ten years ago, there have been tons of really objectionable games on Steam in recent years. Eg I just checked and the game where you roleplay as Kyle Rittenhouse shooting protestors is still on Steam. Per Wikipedia: > [Hatred] was shortly removed by Valve from their Steam Greenlight service due to its extremely violent content but was later brought back with a personal apology from [Valve's co-founder] Gabe Newell.
- Dracophoenix 1y agoThe fact that it was removed at all was a sea-change from Valve's previous stance. Temporary or not, it set a precedent for other removals. For example, Valve had unceremoniously prevented the publication of Super Seducer 3 and retroactively de-published its prequels as a result of a campaign launched by a group of British feminists. (https://happymag.tv/super-seducer-3-steam/ https://happymag.tv/super-seducer-3-steam/)
- presentation 1y agoThe USA is extremely litigious, rules are decided not by the legislature usually but instead by people suing each other to establish case law, and anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim. So probably people who don’t like the idea of adult content can use the courts to make payment processors’ lives painful and they decide to just forgo that business. US courts are too easy to use as a tool of abuse.
- dahart 1y agoThis is an oft-repeated misconception. Germany is almost twice as litigious as the US. Sweden and Austria are also more litigious than the US. > anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim This is FUD, not reality. While it’s “possible” for anyone in any country to try to sue, it simply doesn’t happen in the US more often than elsewhere. The relatively high number of US lawsuits are filled with corporate litigation, contract disputes, bankruptcy filings, car accidents, and appeals, among many other things, and not people suing each other for minor grievances. “Coffee spills, Pokemon class actions, tobacco settlements. American courts have made a name for themselves as a wild lottery and a money machine for lucky few lawyers. At least in part, however, the reputation is unfounded. American courts seem to handle routine contract and tort disputes as well as their peers in other wealthy democracies. “More generally, Americans do not file an unusually high number of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts. And they do not pay unusually high prices for insurance against routine torts. “Instead, American courts have made the bad name for themselves by mishandling a few peculiar categories of law suits. In this article, we use securities class actions and mass torts to illustrate the phenomenon, but anyone who reads a newspaper could suggest alternatives. “The implications for reform are straightforward: focus not on the litigation as a whole; focus on the specifically mishandled types of suits.” http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/Ramseyer_681.pdf http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/R...
- presentation 1y agoI can also pull out numbers and statistics that make it sound like the US is more litigous than other nations, like how it spends way more than any country as a fraction of GDP on litigation [1] as well as how litigation is used frivolously to prevent projects by weaponizing environmental regulation like NEPA and CEQA, to prevent the construction of practically anything in the USA. But all that aside, taking that Harvard law article at face value, there are specifically mishandled types of suits, and those include those that are intended to inflict cost on payments processors to get them to reject customers that otherwise aren't doing anything illegal, but just operate in an industry that those suing don't like. [1] https://instituteforlegalreform.com/wp-content/uploads/media/ILR_NERA_Study_International_Liability_Costs-update.pdf#:~:text=%E2%80%A2%20The%20U,Belgium%2C%20the%20Netherlands%20and%20Portugal https://instituteforlegalreform.com/wp-content/uploads/media...
- guidedlight 1y agoAnother factor is that credit providers (i.e. banks) are increasingly using customer transaction data to assess customer behaviour as part of its risk scoring. If a customer is regularly purchasing adult material that would be definitely be a red flag.
- chao- 1y agoA red flag of what?
- supertrope 1y agoDefaulting on their credit card bill. Or the account ends up having been started by an identity fraudster. Which also ends in default.
- jrflowers 1y agoThat seems backward. The people I’ve known that spend a lot of money on adult entertainment are exactly the group that pays their bills.
- SXX 1y agoThis. I dont know who do you need to be in order to pay for the porn that you can pirate for free. In case of games or music or movies there is collecting and convinience, but porn is pretty much opposite. But at the same time chance of "oops it's not mine" charbacks likely much higher compared to other spending.
- globular-toast 1y agoThen why would they want to stop getting these red flags?
- LorenPechtel 1y agoRed flag for what? A regular purchaser of adult entertainment almost certainly has enough cash flow to pay their bills. And they'll have a hard time claiming it's not them when it matches their previous activity. Having an interest in sex doesn't in the slightest suggest a person is bad--if anything, the apparent lack of interest would be more worrisome. (Not that purchase history can be used to discern this.) Some of the ones who don't are asexuals, but some are those who are repressing their sexuality--and that's more likely to show up in unacceptable ways. A first time purchaser of adult entertainment is another matter--that's going to have a lot of spouse-found-out chargebacks.
- bitwize 1y agoIt could be a holdover from Operation Choke Point, an Obama-administration arm-twisting initiative that would subject banks to more regulatory scrutiny and possible disciplinary action if they did business with certain "high-risk businesses" including firearm and pornography sellers. Ostensibly the initiative was ended in 2017, but banks are probably still afraid to be handed the black spot for doing business with the "wrong" sorts of people.
- nullc 1y ago> Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to? Generally no, but they exist in a regulatory morass where it's impossible to do what they do without arguably or perhaps technically being in violation of hundreds of regulations at any given time. The US government then uses their power to selectively enforce the voluminous mess of bad regulations to coerce parties to undertake actions which it would be flatly illegal for the government to perform directly such as cutting off sexually explicit content from payment rails. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point The practice isn't limited to payment processors but they're a particularly good vector given the level of regulation they're subjected to. Choke Point (and Choke point 2) are just specific examples of a general tactic to end run around the public's rights that has been used by the US government for decades. In most cases the abuse isn't so well organized that it has a project name you can point at. Congress and the whitehouse leaning on social media companies to suppress lawful opinions on covid policy is another example of that kind of abuse that has received some public scrutiny. Most cases, however, go without notice particularly since the ultimate victims of the actions generally have no way to know the cause.
- kwar13 1y agoSee Bill Ackman and his crusade against PornHub.
- nibman 1y ago[dead]
- herbst 1y agoJust one of the ways the US forces it's weird morals onto the world.
- PicassoCTs 1y agoSexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success. You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life. From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line. Its a ugly recipe, but its working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves. A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason. Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
- sapphicsnail 1y ago> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life. Sex freaks hyper specialize in things all the time. Monks and priests also had reputations as horny perverts in Medieval literature. Also, there are plenty of non-Western countries that have been functional. This is such an out of touch, ahistorical take.
- kergonath 1y ago> Also, there are plenty of non-Western countries that have been functional. And there are plenty of western countries that do not work like that, as well.
- kergonath 1y ago> Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success. It is a feature of a subset of the culture in some countries. It is far less universal as you say. > You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life. This really does not follow. How does the existence of laws prevent someone to live a normal life? In a liberal democracy, laws fundamentally guarantee that we can do so, as long as someone’s fundamental individual freedom does not cause unacceptable harm to someone else. In that framework, what we do in private with consenting adults is absolutely nobody’s business. Rule of law does not change this. > From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line. What line is this? In which way was Turing’s persecution a requirement for him being a genius? How do we benefit from him killing himself instead of leaving him be and make other contributions to our intellectual development? > It’s an ugly recipe, but it’s working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves. It is not. What you are advocating is a theocracy and there are many examples in History and around the world that show that it is a terrible idea. > A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason. All I can say is LOL. Ceremonial clothing is more nuanced than that. > Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices. The fact that you only see these possibilities says a lot more about you than the way human beings work.
- globular-toast 1y agoControl. People get a kick out of controlling others and stopping them doing things that don't effect them in any way. It's like how being a practising gay was illegal or how using certain drugs still is.
- johnisgood 1y agoSo true. People love meddling into other people's lives, control their actions, etc.
- irusensei 1y agoI think the biggest issue here is that somewhere down the line we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism. Our governments and regulators punish those institutions for "not doing enough" to prevent such things from happening. You might think I'm defending the multibillion company but here comes the catch: all of this is expensive so when you are doing something funky even though not illegal they just cut you out. You are a small dev or merchant and it's not worth running a whole monitoring apparatus over your activities. Then we get into this situation where borderline cartel activity like this happens and we have a sort of shadow government enacting their own regulations. This raises some eyebrows dont you think? It will probably continue until governments realize this is happening.
- peanut-walrus 1y agoThe responsibility ended up with payment processors and other financial institutions because otherwise they would be forced to give access to all their customer / transaction data to governments and law enforcement. I really wish we had a push for payment neutrality. Financial transactions are infrastructure and infrastructure should be dumb and neutral. Why does everyone have to suffer slow and expensive transfers just to maybe occasionally catch some bad guys (and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced)? And of course once you're already doing it, there's inevitably overreach, as evidenced by Visa here. And before someone chimes in about how crypto will solve this: yes, crypto has already solved this for the criminal class. But most of the rest of people still have to suffer all the fincrime policing every time they move money or pay for something.
- irusensei 1y ago> and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced I read somewhere that criminal organizations and individuals love KYC and AML because they have the resources to go around it and it makes their operations look legit.
- wood_spirit 1y agoAs a generalisation it seems sensible that it should be illegal to knowingly handle illegal things and the proceeds of illegal things. It’s hard to say that it’s ok to profit from someone else’s crime. If I sell you a bike cheap, no questions asked, then you ought be as culpable as me as you don’t have reasonable doubt that it’s stolen. Etc. This can be weaponised. The lobbies go after visa and Mastercard etc by giving the company “proof” that same transactions are very illegal, eg leaks or underage or duress etc. This forces them in the position of being complicit which means they have to step back.
- stuaxo 1y agoWho runs Mastercard, are they linked to some American prudes?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- WhyNotHugo 1y ago> Is there some regulation that requires them to? There isn’t. Even worse, there’s no legislation prohibited them from doing so. Payment processors (eg: Mastercard, Visa) are the ultimate deciders of whether you can sell something online or not, regardless of whether it is legal. They haven’t just blocked adult content, they’ve also blocked non-profits with which they disagree in the past. We need much stronger legislation around this. Private entities shouldn’t be capable of deciding that a given organisation can’t charge online. Only institutions which represent the public’s interests should have this level of influence.
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago> Some of these games seem completely abhorrent Why would you consider those abhorrent while games where you can slaughter people, or commit all kinds of crimes like any random GTA, are widely considered normal? I'll never understand American morals. What's clear is that we need non-US payment processors so that the values of a given culture aren't imposed worldwide.
- bornfreddy 1y agoSay what you want about crypto, but it does solve this problem at least.
- munksbeer 1y agoYes, stable-coins do. But if you have a crypto where the entire point seems to be "it should be worth more tomorrow than today", then it is stupid to use it to transact in rather than to hoard. On the other hand, stable-coins suffer the same problems as visa. They're centralised, and subject to zealous regulations.
- mritterhoff 1y agoI expect my index funds to be worth more tomorrow than today (on average), but still manage to pay for things with USD. If buying, selling and transacting fees are low enough, I don't see why bitcoin's (to pick one) value changes would matter much.
- munksbeer 1y agoWell that's the point isn't it? You don't buy an index fund in order to transact in it. On-ramp has costs, then transaction has costs. And in my country at least, selling crypto (which is what you're doing when you buy something with it) is a taxable transaction. So now I have to keep all my transactions and report them to HMRC each year if I do that. It's not going to happen. If people wanted to transact in crypto, they'd be doing it by now, it has had more than enough time.
- docmars 1y agoGet this - they power the payments infrastructure for OnlyFans, which to many people is arguably more degenerate than a few adult-themed games. People can also buy TV shows and movies in which their content is far more grusome and disturbing than the video-games targeted by the activist groups putting pressure on payment processors. I noticed someone else posted a list of other groups, but another one is called "Collective Shout", who censors their own ads because their subject matter is considered harmful.
- canibal 1y agoAside from the moral clamor, if something has a higher likelihood of fraud, there's a direct relationship with the increase of its cost. Both legal fees and labor cost to deal with these claims could add up more than we outsiders may realize. It's very possible that some risk-averse analyst "ran the numbers", and decided this wasn't worth it. I would also speculate that there may be a certain hidden coat of false fraud claims. Certain folks buying something in the moment, then shamefully claiming they didn't after the fact, which in turn could carry the costs associated with processing a new card & number or conversely fighting false claims. As for the morality angle though, while I definitely agree that these companies' main motivation has to be increasing revenue and profit, and that their only reason for doing anything is cost-driven; you never know what middle-manager who is swayed by what belief is actually making these decisions. So as much as the monolithic goal of the organization is more money, there are still emotional (and financially fallible) people pulling the levers.
- nemomarx 1y agoThe fraud thing explains why they might avoid an entirely adult storefront for it, but for steam? who has their own refund policies and support system that presumably shields the payment processor from charge backs most of the time? There are also large anti porn lobbying groups applying pressure to the payment processors, so that angle creates costs in a different way.
- bitmasher9 1y agoSteam’s refund policy and support system doesn’t eliminate the possibility of someone buying on steam with their CC and then calling their CC and claiming fraud.
- ErigmolCt 1y agoI think they'd rather overcorrect than risk reputational damage
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Krasnol 1y agoThe Thielesque climate in the US will grow even more of those scams while simultaneously destroying the justice apparatus. Cyberpunk is coming for us.
- unethical_ban 1y agoThe US government has deputized payment processors to impose restrictions on commerce when it suits them.
- draw_down 1y ago[dead]
- LorenPechtel 1y ago"Completely abhorrent" is subjective. If you want it banned, show me the victims that would be saved. Otherwise, what happens behind closed doors is none of our business. And the legality of them--we still have obscenity statutes on the books. Garbage as far as I'm concerned, but they're still there.
- OhioMan2943 1y agoHow can you not see the pattern yet? They've been putting the industry into deliberate managed decline for the last 2 years. Simply because it made people happy and that is a threat to the valueless deeducated world that they are trying to impose.
- splaysx 1y agoI'm more curious why PCGamer did not publish the name of the games that were removed. There are some incredibly perverse titles in there and if they are advocating to normalize this kind of content, they should have no shame doing so.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoJesus christ it’s not advocating for its normalization, it’s the idea that payment processors aren’t the arbiters of societies morals. You want to ban some weird porn game you use the government.
- matt-attack 1y agoIt’s funny that you read it as calling for normalization. That’s actually never mention. It’s all in your head.