Very much so. Adult businesses have extremely high rates of friendly fraud, which is worsened by the facts that 1) they don't deliver a physical product, so it's difficult for the merchant to prove that a charge was legit, and 2) some customers will charge back purchases which they regret making, or which a partner disapproves of. ("No, honey, I definitely didn't sign up for that porn site, I'll call the bank right away.")
> Pretty sure credit card companies won't let you "chargeback" stripe clubs as fraud even if it wasn't you.
I'm pretty sure they will.
Remember in 2012 the whole hubbub of "pre-checked cross-sales?"
The act of hiding the checkbox below the fold of the screen and make the visitor think there's nothing more below so they won't uncheck the box that says "Yeah, charge me $1 for this 3 day trial, but also sign me up for all these other programs that will bang my card for $60-120/each"
You'd think you were getting a 3 day trial for a buck but instead you'd be getting a $300-1000 charge on your card.
The same technique, though not to such an extreme degree, was used to make candidate loans in the last US election.
I think it led the porn processors like ccbill to become more diligent about agreements / checking on customers doing such things and making sure they were not hidden if employed.
Sadly it's crap like that that is cited in making it harder / more expensive for small operators to do business, yet from what I gather it's harder to unsubscribe from the NY times than it is multiple porn sites these days.
I wish the exorbitant fees they charge due to higher chargebacks like that were only charged to people who engage in such things - it sucks that people who do a fair above board business are charged extra - it's just an excuse to soak others at this point.
I guess you could buy a chain of Bureau de Change outlets and have them convert cash to bitcoin, monero etc. I'm surprised this isn't already happening to be honest - they have all the infrastructure and licenses already.
I doubt ApplePay would support it.
Perhaps a membership service like Costco. Probably someone has tried it, like perhaps a casino chain.
Apple Pay is widely accepted because of three things, ordered here from least to most important: Apple applying pressure on the processors to accept it, paying them when necessary, and the fact that giant card data breaches like Target and Home Depot meant that the whole market needed to move away from magstripe anyway. People taking grass roots action was not a part of the change in any meaningful way (at least partly because it never happened).
There's this very popular cryptocurrency story that individual people have power in this market. The problem with that narrative is that virtually nobody cares enough this issue because it's just not that important. Sorry.
Edit: update numbers to be correct
for example, I think a lot of people hear this and assume the fraud is like, caused by an OF model - not delivering what was promised for example..
However seeing your statement, I am thinking it's that much fraud because criminals are getting stolen card / Id details from the darker webs and they are using other people's cards for fun things - and OF is a popular place to blow other people's money.
Maybe it's a mix of both - but I would think it's more the other way.
I remember when there were big numbers of fraud pointed at adult sites back in the day - but the core reason was so many offered $1 trials, and it was a popular way to test if a card number you got was valid / not reported stolen yet - use a cheap porn site.
I saw a (possibly npr?) story a while back saying that many criminals are now using dominoe's pizza to test if (stolen ) cards are good, because it's cheap and they get a bonus free pizza for a friend.
So it's not the pizza place or the porn site that is really encouraging the fraud or creating it.. unless you get into the weeds of they accepted a card without the exact right address and so they are a target for card testers.. that's a different discussion and such.
However unless there exist payment rails outside Mastercard or Visa, no one is going to build ”Stripe.” The only way would be Stripe running on crypto, but then how people get crypto in the first place if not by a card?
EDIT: Crypto also lacks chargebacks (so called hard money).
Of course you can. If your wallet was stolen and the perp went to the champagne room at a strip club, you would not be liable for it. The strip club knows that as well so the onus is on them to actually check that the ID matches the person and the card.
Well, not really. The whole point is that if you do that, the government will apply soft pressure on you, until you go out of businesses.
Its an end run around of the 1st amendment, basically. A senator doesn't have to make a law, targeting you specifically. They just have to threaten your bank, that they will be punished, sometime down the line, in an unrelated law, and then the bank will, shut you down.
It seems that was a big part of WireCard's business. Didn't turn out that well. (Though their vice business might've been one of the few parts that actually made some money...)