High risk of what, chargebacks?
This likely caused the card companies, as well as affiliated banks, to re-evaluate their customers and get any adult site off, including the user at the top of this comment thread.
Was his site allowing user-generated content? No. Was he at risk of facilitating child porn? Also no. Would the banks and card companies be willing to research that and make exceptions for a single account? Unlikely.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/visa-to-stop-processing-payments-...
Perhaps somewhat impractical, but a quick skim of Ontario's credit union laws does not seem to preclude a credit union operated by a trade association of pornographers, or similar, to provide personal and commercial banking services to that community.
I know the French Canadians have a reputation for being open-minded (judging by the attitude toward the LGBT community at least, from what I've been told).
That led to a policy of simply dropping porn companies which makes sense even if it's to make it seem like PornHub wasn't unfairly targeted.
[0] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bill-ackman-...
In fairness to PayPal, and the reason for my reply, is that PayPal's tech staff would go to town and do a very thorough investigation of our entire site, including the back end, to make sure it wasn't true, and then would restore the account. So, some companies do have the staff and willingness to actually make the effort to investigate. I had no problem with PayPal doing it, I just wish they didn't block first, but they were simply covering themselves and I totally understand their business position.
Even if they didn't, bringing in $120k / year into the account from a crypto exchange would raise a lot of questions and that, in and of itself, would likely get branded "high risk" by the bank since there is a perception that 100% of Bitcoin activity is money laundering.
If you get Bitcoin in, and then you convert it to USD, why not?
In case anyone is wondering, this is money laundering, and if you wind up with the wrong person on the other side, getting arrested and charged is among the better outcomes.
Running a legal porn site isn’t illegal.
I assumed that wouldn't be necessary if not operating like a business with the intention to turn a profit. If I sold my car for cash, would I have the same responsibility?
Let us know what bank you're using so we can avoid it.
> We promoted affiliate programs and would get paid by our sponsors
I would have assumed the opposite. Ad buyers aren’t idealogues.
The advertisers are aware of what business the website is in, they want to advertise there, but the owner's bank closed his account.
> We promoted affiliate programs and would get paid by our sponsors
All crypto has done is add an extra layer of complexity on top of the fundamental problem.
In the West - maybe, but check pornolab.net - they are asking for crypto donations right now. They can’t get anything else (but for a different reason) but they can make use of crypto.
You would need to hire a crypto savvy trader to distribute your risks over several currencies and exchanges.. and when you reaches $250,000 in valuation (which hopefully the employee tells you it is), you need to hire a second to make sure it all doesn't disappear in an uninsured irretrievable early retirement package for the trader.
You basically have to set up a crypto business along with your actual business idea... Compared to traditional small business where you can hire an accountant to do payroll for just a few hours, and you have next to no risk your accountant can easily run off with millions of your dollars that you can't get back.
They flex this by putting leverage on the banks to not support this either, as they could lose the ability to work with Visa or Mastercard if they start doing banking outside their TOS.
There are some reasons why this could be a good thing - pornography is an industry rife with problems of trafficking, abuse, etc. and denying funding of that kind of behaviour is not without reason. But this tends to spill over to just about everything that /isn't/ abusive as well, which leads to adult sites and the like not being able to secure their own funding or get support from banks.
In my experience in the industry that is perception, not reality. There were a few cases to make the news cycle, like the Girls Do Porn lawsuit and the MindGeek/PornHub controversy with user-submitted content.
But precisely because of public perception the adult industry tends to be pretty good at self-regulating in my experience and opinion. I remember getting an email from a sponsor of mine several years ago telling us that their content could in no way be associated with text that includes "drunk / drinking / intoxicated" etc. and they told us that we had to change the copy on the pages that featured their content. Consent is a huge topic and way more nuanced than most people assume.
The finance industry on the other hand? We're talking about institutions that fund weapons dealers and warlords. With global investments from rights-infringing countries. Not to mention the white collar crime and corruption that comes out of that industry.
Public perception of the adult industry being "rife with problems" stems from the taboo and ideology IMO. Nothing is without problems, but it's all relative and some industries do have it worse than others.
You'd think that annoying complaints from a minority of self-righteous people wouldn't have so much power in banking, but they seem to get listened to time and again.