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Comment by lovingCranberry | Hacker News Reader

OT: I just went through Adyen's prohibited businesses. Why does every major payment processor prohibit vendors of adult toys from using their payment services?

I mean, those aren't even high risk businesses. Credit card fraud usually happens when you offer high priced electronics. Chargebacks usually happen when you sell digital goods like templates, ebooks, videos etc.

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You need a merchant account from a high-risk processor, combined with a generic gateway like Authorize.Net. (Don't use their built in processor) The all in one solutions like Stripe or Adyen are convenient but they aren't what high-risk industries need.

Yes, but how are adult toy sellers "high risk"?

High chargeback rate when one partner won't fess up to spending $300 at Bob's House'O'Dildos?

Because shipping 6 dildos to Texas can put you in jail.

https://www.ladbible.com/news/latest-the-texan-laws-around-s...

The US federal overturn of the Texas law was based around Roe v Wade which has itself been overturned so the Texas law is now back in action.

From the article: “According to Section 43.23 of the Texas penal code, although it doesn’t clearly state dildos, the law still regulates the possession of ‘obscene devices’”

liberal propaganda derived from an SNL skit.

The Forbidden Fruit raid from 1989 was real. I recommend doing some research so that you are not so embarassingly ignorant.

Here a starting point: https://www.austinchronicle.com/features/2000-08-11/78186/

Huh?

Do you have a recommendation for a middle layer for making pretty checkout flows via the API? Authorize.net is what we use - but their API is tough.

I'd love to see a Stripe style wrapper around Authorize, but I don't think it exists. Just thankful we can use JSON now instead of their XML API.

I've wondered about this, too. The simple and unhelpful answer is because banks/CC companies are conservative and consider them high risk. So why is that? I've been able to find two factors: 1) associated (correctly or not) with the sex industry, which is taboo, possibly regulated or outright illegal. 2) high rate of chargebacks. Factors leading to high chargebacks could include no returns allowed and taboo/shame. Imagine an insecure partner finds a charge on a CC and the other partner claims they didn't purchase it, leading to a chargeback to support the lie.

Here is one of the better articles I found: https://instabill.com/do-adult-toys-fall-into-the-high-risk-...

The credit card networks have brand protection clauses in their operating procedures.

They likely don’t actually prohibit adult toys specifically but payment processors can be conservative in fear of having major disruptions from the networks.

Stripe's rules don't even make sense on this - OnlyFans uses Stripe somehow

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