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Comment by Molitor5901 | Hacker News Reader

Unless it's de facto illegal, payment processors should be business agnostic. You can make arguments that it's their platform, their business, they can do whatever they want - but that goes for insurance companies and everyone else we want to act neutrally.

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The problem is that the payment processor is liable for money laundering and other suspicious transactions. They just can’t say that the customer’s business was not their business, there is no safe harbor for payment processors.

I agree, but the money laundering would be a de facto criminal act. It would be a mistake, however, to give payment processors a version of Sec. 230. For any financial institution that could be calamitous. Maybe there should be a very minimal line of protection, much like we do with a lot of cybersecurity for banks - they self certify they are doing their best. It still goes back to the original concern: If a payment processor can block someone for a political view, or a business for a social view, what's not stopping them from blocking someone merely over a disagreement about speech - for anyone.

If that's the case, then you have to 1) reduce requirements on the payment processors to do due diligence and/or 2) push handling of risks associated with payments elsewhere.

As others have mentioned, what evidence of risk is there between a normal game purchased on Steam, versus an adult game, purchased on Steam?

Steam has a specific return policy that it applies everywhere, the games don't show up on card statements, and Steam will lock your entire account for charging back.

If there's a secret epidemic of people making new accounts specifically to buy and chargeback on adult games, the solution is for the processor to pressure Steam to take measures to reduce fradulent chargebacks (e.g. through minimum account age requirements for adult games), not to censor the platform.

You're being too first principles here, for one. These giant operations have coarse rules because they are giant. Coming up with a single counterexample is not compelling. Coarse rules are inherently going to have false positives. That's a feature not a bug - regulated entities can't risk racking up offenses due to their automations or policies being too lax. Sooo..you did not "gotchya" anything with your comment.

Secondly, I was talking about categorically changing how we treat MC/Visa. If you are going to change their class of operation, something has to give. And it gets complicated.

Certain types of transactions come with different types of risk... one might reasonably assume that X-rated games fall into the "frequently fraudulent" category

>one might reasonably assume that X-rated games fall into the "frequently fraudulent" category

There was no such evidence presented, all the evidence was that some christian extremists complained.

Sure your wife might see that you have a payment to pornhub and might not like it but you will not get on your credit card report the name of the game you bought from Steam or GOG so this fake excuse does not work like it would have worked with adult sites subscriptions.

But if there is evidence for Steam and GOG let me know, if somehow I missed the news and the chritian extemists were not the one that pressured VISA then also let me know.

Steam in particular is known to play hardball with chargebacks. If you issue a chargeback, rumor is that Steam will lock your entire account. Which seems incredibly unfair, but capitalism.

If the theoretical angle is stolen credit cards, I am unmoved. The point of stolen credit cards is to launder for durable goods/services. The external value of a digital porn game is $0.

This is generally true not just for Steam. By issuing a chargeback, you're burning that bridge and shouldn't be expect to do business with that vendor again.

That is not the case. A non-criminal chargeback maybe, but if you've had your card stolen and chargeback with a merchant for that, they don't hold that against you.

Though, it maybe be more annoying to get your purchase approved because the automated risk system will flag it.

We sell product to people with prior chargebacks with us every single day

No future business, maybe. Steam locking your account could take a library with thousands of dollars of purchases.

As far as I can tell, you get restricted from buying new games/activating codes, but they don't take away your existing library (besides the one you chargeback'd).

>Steam in particular is known to play hardball with chargebacks. If you issue a chargeback, rumor is that Steam will lock your entire account. Which seems incredibly unfair, but capitalism.

1 do we have evidence this is happening more with adult games? You can refund games in 2 hours I think, so it is enough to get that clarity and refund the game or find it is trash and refund it.

2 the evidence points to a Christian Extremist group, so are you guessing here ?

If we are just pulling guesses from our asses I would guess that children that get their hands on the parent credit card could buy a lot of bullshit , then parents find out since the bullshit costs much more than a game and would attempt to recover the money sicn ehte time interval passed. And afaik all single player games can be obtained for free so honestly if someone is in doubt about some adult game they can find a free version somewhere and do not risk getting found out by some partner that spies on their Steam Library content or purchases.

This has always been a lie.

The entire giftcard industry operates with these payment networks just fine despite large chargeback percentages that come from literal stolen credit cards

If the claim that "higher chargeback risk" like that cut you off from the payment networks were true, you would not be able to buy gift cards with credit cards.

To your point, lots of cards both limit purchases and charge higher rates on giftcard purchases to offset the risk.

Why would anyone assume that these are frequently fraudulent, especially within a managed platform like Steam?

When Fandango at Home sells you the movie Shortbus is it more likely to be a fraudulent transaction than when they sell you Shrek?

Different content absolutely has different risk profiles.

However, the payment networks do not care. As long as you aren't literally a front for laundering stolen credit cards, they are happy to take your money and very happy to charge you for every single chargeback.

There has NEVER been any evidence presented to support this "porn has high chargeback rates" claim, and other fields that DO have high chargeback rates have no problems taking credit cards.

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