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Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those catego

Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those categories. There's no actual evidence in the article that payment processors made them do it. They actually banned pornography long before this. They just updated the terms to clarify what counted as pornography. > Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency actually does avoid this problem because it doesn't allow chargebacks and the consumer has to foot the bill for transaction fees. Those are also the reasons why consumers don't like it. > Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby? They're not? They would have the same high risk accounts and include the higher fees into their business model.

eggbrain 6mo ago
> Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those categories. Stripe _says_ they will handle these type of payments, but more often than not, within roughly a year of implementation you'll get an email from them kicking you off their platform, no matter how vigilant you were, or even if the things you were selling were more rated R than rated X. Source: my own insider knowledge along with colleagues in the space.
- echelon 6mo ago
  Why is this no longer on the front page of HN? This should be the top article. It's only an hour old and has hundreds up upvotes. The payments industry is strong arming free speech to promote religious fundamentalism. There is no such thing as vice content being higher risk. That's a diversion topic. Fewer and fewer people are hiding porn payments from their wives. We don't need the religious oligarchy dictating how you can live. Edit: it's back. Halfway down the page. A few minutes ago it was not on the home page at all and I had to search for it.
  - slumberlust 6mo ago
    Are you viewing by the default page or active? Several of these articles were discussed last year when the processors were pressuring Valve. Maybe a little topic fatigue?
  - infecto 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - mcphage 6mo ago
      > This is not free speech. Adult content is not a protected class. Why does adult content not count as speech?
      - infecto 6mo ago
        US civics 101. The first amendment mostly restricts government action. This is not a free speech issue unless you want to legislate that adult content is a protected class or want to make a special clause for payment processing. This is a perfect use case for crypto imo. If you are making an argument that new legislation needs to made, great but unfortunately people jump to the idea that this is immediately a free speech issue.
        Fargren 6mo ago
        Freedom of speech is not defined by the US constitution. Free speech is an ideological stance, not a legal definition. US laws protects some forms of free speech and not others.
        infecto 6mo ago
        Good luck with that. We can all day long discuss what is free speech and not free speech but unless it’s a protected class or a carveout for payment processors it does not matter. Propose solutions instead. You could argue that payment processors control so much of the market that it’s like the government limiting speech but I would counter argue that they could use crypto easily. Not to mention usually businesses use payment processors as the scape goat. Very few business, other than purpose built, want to deal with adult content.
iamnothere 6mo ago
This may have been true at some point and is the conventional wisdom now, but it’s no longer accurate as pointed out by others in the discussion here. There’s a lot of pressure coming from anti-porn activists who seem to have zeroed in on smaller companies as the most vulnerable. OnlyFans and the PornHub parent company have faced many different attacks as well, including lawsuits and campaigns for age verification laws, but for whatever reason they seem to be immune to financial pressure. Probably because all they do is adult content, so they are willing to fight it no matter the cost! (Note that OnlyFans did get attacked in this same way before and briefly attempted to pivot to non-adult content before rapidly backpedaling after a user and creator uproar.)
PretzelPirate 6mo ago
> because it doesn't allow chargebacks You can have chargebacks in crypto if the payment is scripted to allow chargebacks. It would be up to the merchant and the buyer on whether or not to allow that, and who would mediate the dispute.
- epolanski 6mo ago
  How do you script a chargeback with Bitcoin payments?
  - vova_hn2 6mo ago
    One of the options: money go to a 2/3 multisig address, 1 key is controlled by the customer, 1 key is controlled by the service provider, 1 key is controlled by an escrow service.
- miki123211 6mo ago
  And unlike in trad fi, you can have the dispute mediator / escrow manager / trustee be physically limited in what they can do with the money. Visa can run away with your unclaimed payouts (if forced to do so by law enforcement for example). This doesn't have to be true in crypto; you can set things up so that the third party can either release the money to the payee or send it back to the payer, without giving them the capability to send it to some arbitrary address of their choosing.
- akerl_ 6mo ago
  That's not a chargeback, that's an escrow service.
  - PretzelPirate 6mo ago
    That is charge back. Even with a credit card, your bank is the mediator between you and the merchant.
Scaled 6mo ago
Just FYI, the high rate of fraud is FUD. I am in the field, have a very good chargeback rate, and still cannot secure card processing at fair terms. The processors I have spoken to know chargeback rates are low, but it's a rigged system designed to extract maximal revenue by middlemen.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago
  A country with sane policy would consider payment processing to be infrastructure every bit as much as bridges or airports or an electrical grid. Any country even dabbling with the idea of becoming cashless should have to consider it that.
- criddell 6mo ago
  That's like a 16 year old saying the auto insurance game is rigged because they are a very good driver but can't get cheap insurance. Maybe your rates are high because of the risk pool you are in.
  - Hackbraten 6mo ago
    But what kind of risk would that be? For adolescents and auto insurance, it makes sense to me (higher testosterone levels, less driving experience, not yet fully developed sense of risks/consequences, fewer spouses/children who depend on their livelihood etc. etc.) But why would fraud be more prevalent specifically in the adult content industry than the average over all the industries? Do criminals prefer working in porn than elsewhere? Why? Or do chargebacks simply occur more often due to spouses disputing a charge in an attempt to save face in front of their partner?
    - dhosek 6mo ago
      There’s going to be a lot of the spouse saving face chargebacks, people using stolen card numbers to download porn to avoid exposing their use to anyone else, active use of porn sites as a means of laundering funds from stolen card numbers—if you’re in an organization that does prostitution and card theft, you can use a third-party porn site to turn stolen card numbers into cash, etc.
NoahZuniga 6mo ago
pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM.
- chimeracoder 6mo ago
  > pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM. There are orders of magnitude more CSAM on other platforms, such as Facebook. As explained elsewhere in the comments, Pornhub was targeted by evangelical, anti-pornography groups which weaponized claims of CSAM against Pornhub for their own political purposes, despite the fact that Pornhub had vanishingly few instances even compared to other pornography platforms, let alone non-pornography platforms (like Facebook).
- subscribed 6mo ago
  And yet X can still accept payments even though it officially allows paid CSAM generation. I am not sure if CSAM is the only reason for this group - notice they specifically listed MILF/DILF, that doesn't involve or imply CSAM in any way.
  - Manuel_D 6mo ago
    "CSAM generation" is an oxymoron. The justification behind criminalizing mere possession of CSAM is that it requires the abuse of a child to produce. This is not the case with fictional content. If the media does not depict an actual child being abused, is is by definition not CSAM.
    - subscribed 6mo ago
      I'm partially with you on that one ("computer generated") but the laws converge to the position that if the computer-generated pixels are arranged in such a way that it's a young human, it's CSAM. Also we're not arguing the language here or its adherence to the specific reality, but the blunt tool the laws are. Putting other countries laws aside, I believe that digitally manipulating the image of the real child in that way results in the production of the actual CSAM and as such is a federal crime. And back to my previous comment - actual children are involved, so the abuse actually happens. If you doubt it, feel free to read up about women who experienced their own AI-manipulated pictures to make them appear naked - I don't think you deny the actual harm here. In terms of generation (harming pixels), I think the idea of the lawmakers is to criminalise similar ones as well ("indistinguishable from a real child") to offer some protections to real children.
dhosek 6mo ago
Some 15 years ago, I interviewed at a payment processor that specialized in NFSW customers and pretty much the fraud/chargeback rate is ridiculously high for porn sites and the like. Elsewhere in the thread someone commented about even vigilant customers getting kicked off stripe, but I’m guessing that even with vigilance, the fraud/chargeback rate will be much higher than an acceptable threshold. There’s a limit to what you can do. When I was taking credit cards in the 90s, I managed to have an almost perfect record (the advantage of selling print subscriptions where a stable delivery address is needed), but got burned by a purchase with a stolen card where they bought a number of back issues plus a 2-year subscription and had it all sent to Hungary.
xingped 6mo ago
> Cryptocurrency actually does avoid this problem because it doesn't allow chargebacks and the consumer has to foot the bill for transaction fees. Those are also the reasons why consumers don't like it. I think the reasons consumers don't like cryptocurrency has more to do with its overwhelming use for and exposure to scams, fraud, money-laundering, etc. than with no chargeback support or having to foot the transaction fees...

eggbrain 6mo ago

> Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those categories. Stripe _says_ they will handle these type of payments, but more often than not, within roughly a year of implementation you'll get an email from them kicking you off their platform, no matter how vigilant you were, or even if the things you were selling were more rated R than rated X. Source: my own insider knowledge along with colleagues in the space.

echelon 6mo ago
Why is this no longer on the front page of HN? This should be the top article. It's only an hour old and has hundreds up upvotes. The payments industry is strong arming free speech to promote religious fundamentalism. There is no such thing as vice content being higher risk. That's a diversion topic. Fewer and fewer people are hiding porn payments from their wives. We don't need the religious oligarchy dictating how you can live. Edit: it's back. Halfway down the page. A few minutes ago it was not on the home page at all and I had to search for it.
- slumberlust 6mo ago
  Are you viewing by the default page or active? Several of these articles were discussed last year when the processors were pressuring Valve. Maybe a little topic fatigue?
- infecto 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mcphage 6mo ago
    > This is not free speech. Adult content is not a protected class. Why does adult content not count as speech?
    - infecto 6mo ago
      US civics 101. The first amendment mostly restricts government action. This is not a free speech issue unless you want to legislate that adult content is a protected class or want to make a special clause for payment processing. This is a perfect use case for crypto imo. If you are making an argument that new legislation needs to made, great but unfortunately people jump to the idea that this is immediately a free speech issue.
      - Fargren 6mo ago
        Freedom of speech is not defined by the US constitution. Free speech is an ideological stance, not a legal definition. US laws protects some forms of free speech and not others.
        infecto 6mo ago
        Good luck with that. We can all day long discuss what is free speech and not free speech but unless it’s a protected class or a carveout for payment processors it does not matter. Propose solutions instead. You could argue that payment processors control so much of the market that it’s like the government limiting speech but I would counter argue that they could use crypto easily. Not to mention usually businesses use payment processors as the scape goat. Very few business, other than purpose built, want to deal with adult content.

iamnothere 6mo ago

This may have been true at some point and is the conventional wisdom now, but it’s no longer accurate as pointed out by others in the discussion here. There’s a lot of pressure coming from anti-porn activists who seem to have zeroed in on smaller companies as the most vulnerable. OnlyFans and the PornHub parent company have faced many different attacks as well, including lawsuits and campaigns for age verification laws, but for whatever reason they seem to be immune to financial pressure. Probably because all they do is adult content, so they are willing to fight it no matter the cost! (Note that OnlyFans did get attacked in this same way before and briefly attempted to pivot to non-adult content before rapidly backpedaling after a user and creator uproar.)

PretzelPirate 6mo ago

> because it doesn't allow chargebacks You can have chargebacks in crypto if the payment is scripted to allow chargebacks. It would be up to the merchant and the buyer on whether or not to allow that, and who would mediate the dispute.

epolanski 6mo ago
How do you script a chargeback with Bitcoin payments?
- vova_hn2 6mo ago
  One of the options: money go to a 2/3 multisig address, 1 key is controlled by the customer, 1 key is controlled by the service provider, 1 key is controlled by an escrow service.
miki123211 6mo ago
And unlike in trad fi, you can have the dispute mediator / escrow manager / trustee be physically limited in what they can do with the money. Visa can run away with your unclaimed payouts (if forced to do so by law enforcement for example). This doesn't have to be true in crypto; you can set things up so that the third party can either release the money to the payee or send it back to the payer, without giving them the capability to send it to some arbitrary address of their choosing.
akerl_ 6mo ago
That's not a chargeback, that's an escrow service.
- PretzelPirate 6mo ago
  That is charge back. Even with a credit card, your bank is the mediator between you and the merchant.

Scaled 6mo ago

Just FYI, the high rate of fraud is FUD. I am in the field, have a very good chargeback rate, and still cannot secure card processing at fair terms. The processors I have spoken to know chargeback rates are low, but it's a rigged system designed to extract maximal revenue by middlemen.

NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago
A country with sane policy would consider payment processing to be infrastructure every bit as much as bridges or airports or an electrical grid. Any country even dabbling with the idea of becoming cashless should have to consider it that.
criddell 6mo ago
That's like a 16 year old saying the auto insurance game is rigged because they are a very good driver but can't get cheap insurance. Maybe your rates are high because of the risk pool you are in.
- Hackbraten 6mo ago
  But what kind of risk would that be? For adolescents and auto insurance, it makes sense to me (higher testosterone levels, less driving experience, not yet fully developed sense of risks/consequences, fewer spouses/children who depend on their livelihood etc. etc.) But why would fraud be more prevalent specifically in the adult content industry than the average over all the industries? Do criminals prefer working in porn than elsewhere? Why? Or do chargebacks simply occur more often due to spouses disputing a charge in an attempt to save face in front of their partner?
  - dhosek 6mo ago
    There’s going to be a lot of the spouse saving face chargebacks, people using stolen card numbers to download porn to avoid exposing their use to anyone else, active use of porn sites as a means of laundering funds from stolen card numbers—if you’re in an organization that does prostitution and card theft, you can use a third-party porn site to turn stolen card numbers into cash, etc.

NoahZuniga 6mo ago

pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM.

chimeracoder 6mo ago
> pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM. There are orders of magnitude more CSAM on other platforms, such as Facebook. As explained elsewhere in the comments, Pornhub was targeted by evangelical, anti-pornography groups which weaponized claims of CSAM against Pornhub for their own political purposes, despite the fact that Pornhub had vanishingly few instances even compared to other pornography platforms, let alone non-pornography platforms (like Facebook).
subscribed 6mo ago
And yet X can still accept payments even though it officially allows paid CSAM generation. I am not sure if CSAM is the only reason for this group - notice they specifically listed MILF/DILF, that doesn't involve or imply CSAM in any way.
- Manuel_D 6mo ago
  "CSAM generation" is an oxymoron. The justification behind criminalizing mere possession of CSAM is that it requires the abuse of a child to produce. This is not the case with fictional content. If the media does not depict an actual child being abused, is is by definition not CSAM.
  - subscribed 6mo ago
    I'm partially with you on that one ("computer generated") but the laws converge to the position that if the computer-generated pixels are arranged in such a way that it's a young human, it's CSAM. Also we're not arguing the language here or its adherence to the specific reality, but the blunt tool the laws are. Putting other countries laws aside, I believe that digitally manipulating the image of the real child in that way results in the production of the actual CSAM and as such is a federal crime. And back to my previous comment - actual children are involved, so the abuse actually happens. If you doubt it, feel free to read up about women who experienced their own AI-manipulated pictures to make them appear naked - I don't think you deny the actual harm here. In terms of generation (harming pixels), I think the idea of the lawmakers is to criminalise similar ones as well ("indistinguishable from a real child") to offer some protections to real children.

dhosek 6mo ago

Some 15 years ago, I interviewed at a payment processor that specialized in NFSW customers and pretty much the fraud/chargeback rate is ridiculously high for porn sites and the like. Elsewhere in the thread someone commented about even vigilant customers getting kicked off stripe, but I’m guessing that even with vigilance, the fraud/chargeback rate will be much higher than an acceptable threshold. There’s a limit to what you can do. When I was taking credit cards in the 90s, I managed to have an almost perfect record (the advantage of selling print subscriptions where a stable delivery address is needed), but got burned by a purchase with a stolen card where they bought a number of back issues plus a 2-year subscription and had it all sent to Hungary.

xingped 6mo ago

> Cryptocurrency actually does avoid this problem because it doesn't allow chargebacks and the consumer has to foot the bill for transaction fees. Those are also the reasons why consumers don't like it. I think the reasons consumers don't like cryptocurrency has more to do with its overwhelming use for and exposure to scams, fraud, money-laundering, etc. than with no chargeback support or having to foot the transaction fees...