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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

They make £60k pcm in cash, bank transfer, and crypto from it - they must be?

No. Absolutely not.

But you literally are, you just said you sell them. You sell magic mushroom spores and kits for growing them

We sell products which are related to all things mushrooms. There’s equipment, supplies you name it. Our grow kits are for growing shiitake, lion’s mane, king oyster or just about any gourmet mushroom which is legal to grow. Our microscopy spores are a product which are strictly sold for microscopy use. We love mushrooms and all things about them. But illegality is a red line, whether immoral or not.

I think we can see why the payment processors stepped back now.

We spent a long time analysing the terms and conditions and we couldn’t find anything that applied to our business. Asking directly where we broke terms was no hope, because none of which they cited applied to us either.

We wouldn’t go back to card payments if we could. We save a fortune by paying 0% processing fees, have more control and are protected by a regulated UK bank instead of companies like Stripe or PayPal. We are very lucky!

Bro, you're selling drugs on a "for science only!!!!" basis that is purely a fig leaf. IDK the controlled substance laws around Psilocybin but this is definitely a gray area at least.

Maybe take some time to read before making silly accusations like that.

Well, I googled the phrase "microscopy spores" and the first hit was a webpage that first defines the term to mean "observe under a microscope" then warns customers that the cultivation of psychoactive mushrooms is illegal in many places in the world. So at the very least, your competitors are pretty much implying that one _could_ use "microscopy spores" for cultivation, and I imagine the majority of customers are expecting to do so.

And hey, maybe you in particular have cracked the code in how to ship spores in syringes that only inject into slides and not say, a prepared cultivation point. But I am 0 percent surprised payment processors noped out.

I don't however, it's not my cup of tea, but since when are payment processors, which are into money, into applying cultural norms?

Since forever. There are a few reasons why - one is cultural the other is risk. On the cultural side industries that are "controversial" tend to be avoided. Payment processors don't like to be associated with porn, gambling, drugs etc. because of potential negative PR. If you're a payment processor and trying to land big conservative clients, having press about how you support the porn industry doesn't do you any favors.

The other side is risk, meaning industries that have an above average chargeback (fraud) rate. Many times these industries overlap - porn for instance. Lots of stolen credit card numbers are used to by porn, but also legitimate purchases can easily end up as a chargeback. The classic example is that someone buys porn on their credit card and then their partner finds out. Instead of admitting they bought porn, they claim someone must have stolen their credit card to save face.

I’d upvote this if I could. Chargebacks aren’t impossible after paying via bank transfer - it might be called another name, but it has been done before to us by a scammer (but we can dispute and fight it). And one time after a customer added an extra 0 to their transfer and immediately tried to get their bank to claw it back without contacting us.

But we basically never had issues with chargebacks. Even when we used PayPal and Stripe for two years, we only had two chargebacks and we disputed one of them and won through PayPal as we proved it was fraudulent.

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