Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors | Hacker News Reader

Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

kotaku.com

400 pointsstalfosknight287 comments

Why payment processors do it? Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? Strong church lobby? Legal risks? I think its mostly religious groups who who are against adult content and sex, or there are other groups?

Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency. No stupid religious restrictions and stupid political sanctions.

Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby?

Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those categories.

There's no actual evidence in the article that payment processors made them do it. They actually banned pornography long before this. They just updated the terms to clarify what counted as pornography.

> Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency actually does avoid this problem because it doesn't allow chargebacks and the consumer has to foot the bill for transaction fees. Those are also the reasons why consumers don't like it.

> Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby?

They're not? They would have the same high risk accounts and include the higher fees into their business model.

> Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those categories.

Stripe _says_ they will handle these type of payments, but more often than not, within roughly a year of implementation you'll get an email from them kicking you off their platform, no matter how vigilant you were, or even if the things you were selling were more rated R than rated X. Source: my own insider knowledge along with colleagues in the space.

Why is this no longer on the front page of HN?

This should be the top article. It's only an hour old and has hundreds up upvotes.

The payments industry is strong arming free speech to promote religious fundamentalism.

There is no such thing as vice content being higher risk. That's a diversion topic. Fewer and fewer people are hiding porn payments from their wives.

We don't need the religious oligarchy dictating how you can live.

Edit: it's back. Halfway down the page. A few minutes ago it was not on the home page at all and I had to search for it.

No it isn't. It's struggling on the front page because this is a very old story and it's the same conversation every time: payment processors hate this stuff because digital goods are fraud and chargeback magnets, and that's doubly true of adult content.

This would be a reason for processing such transactions to be more expensive.

Those are valid facts, but this is missing an underlying point: HN’s community is not concerned about this form of discrimination, so each time it crosses the front page, we see lots of threads about deregulation but few about the spectre of ethics raised by these acts. Ethics aren’t typically in-scope for HN unless the party harmed is either a for-profit corporation or a tech worker; since HN doesn’t as a community tend to openly self-identify with the fields of sex work, the ethical issues here are effectively out of scope here. One can imagine a different HN that gave the ethical threats to Others as much airtime as it gives to ethical threats to Self. I remain hopeful.

Lots of products have the same fraud/chargeback dynamics are are similar disfavored by payment processors.

If only all moral objections had such plausible-deniability ready to promote disregarding them, we’d never have to teach or debate morality and ethical practices in tech at all! Fortunately, the core debate — should payment processors be required to provide service so long as the operator is cooperative with escrow and other such ‘avoid money going out the door fraudulently’ restrictions on high-chargeback enterprises? — remains a ‘brass ring’ desirable outcome of techno-libertarians and so the issue continues be fought about. (Even if it’s only indirectly a morality debate over sex products.)

This isn't responsive to anything I've written. It's not in any sense a moral debate over sex products. It's a practical debate over how expensive it is to underwrite transactions in these markets. The people involved in making those payments work are extending credit.

Payment processors have constructed a “moral ordering of sexuality” [1] that would be entirely unnecessary if, as you claim, their intentions are purely legal and/or related to high chargeback rates.

If it’s not a moral issue, then the rules should be simple and easily communicable. Examples: Comply with the law of your jurisdiction. Keep your chargeback rates below x%. Instead, payment processors intentionally refuse to enforce consistent rules across platforms. Not the behavior of an economically-motivated, entirely rational agent.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13634607241305579

First off, great article, everyone involved in this discussion should read it.

Second, agreed, if this was primarily about chargeback rates, there'd be no differentiation between disallowing things like hypnosis, (fictional) non-con, BDSM, etc. over vanilla sexual material. Instead it seems to be a mixture of pressure by (primarily religious, though some feminist) anti-porn activists, negative media portrayals (e.g. Kristof's PornHub article in the NYT), and understandable fear of lawsuits resulting from hosting actual illegal material (Visa/Pornhub case in California).

Thanks for taking the time to read the article. I’m glad you appreciated it.

This is all a pretty naive take on dealing with transaction fraud. You're not going to get the transparency you're after.

I’m not calling for “more transparency,” I’m calling into question your assertion that the payment processors are acting out of rational self-interest.

It’s a little strange to complain about no one being responsive to you when you’ve summarily dismissed every comment in this thread.

Once again this is like the 10th time this discussion has played out on HN. If you want to see a less conclusory set of arguments, use the search bar and go back a couple years.

The counterargument here doesn't even make sense. You think payment processors are run by people with weird puritan takes on adult content? No, they're exactly the same nerds that work everywhere else in the industry. I'm sure someone will come up with some just-so story about how payment processors, and only payment processors, are suspectible to influence from religious radicals or whatever, but: special pleading is special pleading.

> Once again this is like the 10th time this discussion has played out on HN.

If the conversation is too boring and repetitive for you personally due to your long, long history as a commenter, you could always choose not to participate in it. That’s more or less what you’ve done here in any case, with the added efficiency of one fewer step.

This is what, past the thirtieth anniversary of Eternal September? I’d think you’ve had plenty of time to cope with the social phenomenon.

> I'm sure someone will come up with some just-so story about how payment processors, and only payment processors, are suspectible to influence from religious radicals or whatever, but: special pleading is special pleading.

A lot of that going around, huh. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48129408

If U.S. credit-card issuers were worried about fraud, they would have implemented the other half of "chip-&-PIN," which the rest of the world has been using for decades.

U.S. customers pretty much JUST got chips in our cards... but issuers "forgot" to implement the PIN part.

Zero sympathy for this scumbag monopoly.

In my country you usually need to confirm payments with SMS OTP, except for trusted merchants (but they take the risk of fraud by opting out from confirmation). So simply stealing a bank card doesn't get you far. And pretending that you did not pay is also more difficult. Is US different? Do banks and clients trust each other in US and do not require OTP?

Yep. If I take someone's credit card, I can use it all I want, until either 1) they notice and cancel the card, or 2) I trip the fraud protection with unusual spending patterns.

Chip & pin doesn’t help with chargebacks or merchant fraud which is what costs credit card processors and issuers in adult content.

I'm talking about day-to-day transactions, not specifically adult content.

Are you viewing by the default page or active? Several of these articles were discussed last year when the processors were pressuring Valve. Maybe a little topic fatigue?

This may have been true at some point and is the conventional wisdom now, but it’s no longer accurate as pointed out by others in the discussion here. There’s a lot of pressure coming from anti-porn activists who seem to have zeroed in on smaller companies as the most vulnerable. OnlyFans and the PornHub parent company have faced many different attacks as well, including lawsuits and campaigns for age verification laws, but for whatever reason they seem to be immune to financial pressure. Probably because all they do is adult content, so they are willing to fight it no matter the cost!

(Note that OnlyFans did get attacked in this same way before and briefly attempted to pivot to non-adult content before rapidly backpedaling after a user and creator uproar.)

Some 15 years ago, I interviewed at a payment processor that specialized in NFSW customers and pretty much the fraud/chargeback rate is ridiculously high for porn sites and the like. Elsewhere in the thread someone commented about even vigilant customers getting kicked off stripe, but I’m guessing that even with vigilance, the fraud/chargeback rate will be much higher than an acceptable threshold. There’s a limit to what you can do. When I was taking credit cards in the 90s, I managed to have an almost perfect record (the advantage of selling print subscriptions where a stable delivery address is needed), but got burned by a purchase with a stolen card where they bought a number of back issues plus a 2-year subscription and had it all sent to Hungary.

> because it doesn't allow chargebacks

You can have chargebacks in crypto if the payment is scripted to allow chargebacks. It would be up to the merchant and the buyer on whether or not to allow that, and who would mediate the dispute.

And unlike in trad fi, you can have the dispute mediator / escrow manager / trustee be physically limited in what they can do with the money.

Visa can run away with your unclaimed payouts (if forced to do so by law enforcement for example). This doesn't have to be true in crypto; you can set things up so that the third party can either release the money to the payee or send it back to the payer, without giving them the capability to send it to some arbitrary address of their choosing.

That's not a chargeback, that's an escrow service.

That is charge back. Even with a credit card, your bank is the mediator between you and the merchant.

How do you script a chargeback with Bitcoin payments?

One of the options: money go to a 2/3 multisig address, 1 key is controlled by the customer, 1 key is controlled by the service provider, 1 key is controlled by an escrow service.

Just FYI, the high rate of fraud is FUD. I am in the field, have a very good chargeback rate, and still cannot secure card processing at fair terms. The processors I have spoken to know chargeback rates are low, but it's a rigged system designed to extract maximal revenue by middlemen.

A country with sane policy would consider payment processing to be infrastructure every bit as much as bridges or airports or an electrical grid. Any country even dabbling with the idea of becoming cashless should have to consider it that.

>Adult chargebacks consistently exceed the 1% threshold that triggers Visa and Mastercard monitoring programs, with secondary industry reporting placing the average annual rate in the 3% to 4% range

>How is an adult chargeback ratio calculated?

Divide the number of chargebacks in a month by the total transactions in the same month. The result is the chargeback ratio. Visa and Mastercard both use this formula, with Visa weighting dispute count and dollar volume together under VAMP.

https://sensapay.com/resources/blog/adult-industry-chargebac...

It seems like that sector has 3-4X the disputes and maybe even fraud, independent of your own business practices or success.

Depends on what you mean by fraud. Chargebacks are known to be high in this area just because of the spouse effect, IE "Hey, honey what is this adult-content charge on our credit card statement?" "Oh obviously must be a mistake, I'll call to have them remove it".

To get around this, some sites use less obvious or vague names, but that creates its own category of chargebacks.

That's like a 16 year old saying the auto insurance game is rigged because they are a very good driver but can't get cheap insurance.

Maybe your rates are high because of the risk pool you are in.

But what kind of risk would that be? For adolescents and auto insurance, it makes sense to me (higher testosterone levels, less driving experience, not yet fully developed sense of risks/consequences, fewer spouses/children who depend on their livelihood etc. etc.)

But why would fraud be more prevalent specifically in the adult content industry than the average over all the industries? Do criminals prefer working in porn than elsewhere? Why? Or do chargebacks simply occur more often due to spouses disputing a charge in an attempt to save face in front of their partner?

Adult industry is digital content that can be "purchased" and then scraped before the chargeback goes through. Now the user has all the content that the site/model/whoever offers and didn't pay anything for it; they can then share it around, resell it, whatever.

It helps that a lot of people have no respect for the people producing the content; they'll happily consume it, but they refuse to acknowledge any work that goes into it or that people should be compensated for what they've created.

Wife goes "was this you?" "no, I must have been hacked".

The stats I've seen actually did put the charge back rate is high compared to other industries.

What does seem like a scam though is, especially in the digital space, a refund is basically free. The merchant could agree in the case of any charge back the credit card company can just take it back, they won't argue, just take it. They'd even agree to pay the transaction fee.

But you can't, so you get the 20% fee, and you still get the money clawed back from you.

There’s going to be a lot of the spouse saving face chargebacks, people using stolen card numbers to download porn to avoid exposing their use to anyone else, active use of porn sites as a means of laundering funds from stolen card numbers—if you’re in an organization that does prostitution and card theft, you can use a third-party porn site to turn stolen card numbers into cash, etc.

I have spoken to others in my field and we all have good chargeback rates.

The problem is the VIRP/BRAM requirements push adult content into using only a handful of acquiring banks, and thus there is insufficient competition to get them to lower rates since where else you gonna go?

> Cryptocurrency actually does avoid this problem because it doesn't allow chargebacks and the consumer has to foot the bill for transaction fees. Those are also the reasons why consumers don't like it.

I think the reasons consumers don't like cryptocurrency has more to do with its overwhelming use for and exposure to scams, fraud, money-laundering, etc. than with no chargeback support or having to foot the transaction fees...

pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM.

> pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM.

There are orders of magnitude more CSAM on other platforms, such as Facebook. As explained elsewhere in the comments, Pornhub was targeted by evangelical, anti-pornography groups which weaponized claims of CSAM against Pornhub for their own political purposes, despite the fact that Pornhub had vanishingly few instances even compared to other pornography platforms, let alone non-pornography platforms (like Facebook).

They were kicked off credit card processor because of conservative anti-porn advocates, not high rates of CSAM. It irony is that PornHub was one of the more tightly policed and more restrictive platforms, but they still got kicked off credit card processors

And yet X can still accept payments even though it officially allows paid CSAM generation.

I am not sure if CSAM is the only reason for this group - notice they specifically listed MILF/DILF, that doesn't involve or imply CSAM in any way.

"CSAM generation" is an oxymoron. The justification behind criminalizing mere possession of CSAM is that it requires the abuse of a child to produce. This is not the case with fictional content. If the media does not depict an actual child being abused, is is by definition not CSAM.

People always retroactively justify anything they see as convenient and uncontroversial, stick to “everyone's opinion” (which does not exist, and is the product of their own projections).

One needs education to explain that, for example, hentai manga has little to do with realism, that character drawing styles have a long history that is only partially intertwined with lolicon wave started in the early 1980s (and that they even cross-pollinated with female-oriented manga along the way), or that the strict indecency ban (again, thanks to US) had created it in the first place (so little girls were actually used to portray proverbial 900 year old vampiresses because you could not draw those vampiresses that way).

Then we can see that any kind of image, even highly realistic, even photographs, is a deliberate set of choices made by the author, not a 1:1 copy of of “reality”. Then we can switch to the viewer side, and study how the contents of people's head define what they see, and how they react.

Here's a party trick. Japanese entertainment industry still produces a significant amount of media with young women in bikini. Weekly Young Magazine (one of the biggest manga periodicals) keeps placing idols on the front cover to this day. Ask someone about it, and listen to the expected comments about “questionable”, “seedy”, and “exploitative” nature of those (which are obviously true to a large extent). Then compare that to Western media products, global pop stars and such, and enjoy the excuses about it being completely different, “suitable for the whole family”, and “playing by the rules”.

I'm partially with you on that one ("computer generated") but the laws converge to the position that if the computer-generated pixels are arranged in such a way that it's a young human, it's CSAM.

Also we're not arguing the language here or its adherence to the specific reality, but the blunt tool the laws are.

Putting other countries laws aside, I believe that digitally manipulating the image of the real child in that way results in the production of the actual CSAM and as such is a federal crime.

And back to my previous comment - actual children are involved, so the abuse actually happens. If you doubt it, feel free to read up about women who experienced their own AI-manipulated pictures to make them appear naked - I don't think you deny the actual harm here.

In terms of generation (harming pixels), I think the idea of the lawmakers is to criminalise similar ones as well ("indistinguishable from a real child") to offer some protections to real children.

> Putting other countries laws aside, I believe that digitally manipulating the image of the real child in that way results in the production of the actual CSAM and as such is a federal crime.

No, it's not. People have been charged, but their convictions overturned. E.g: https://capcentral.org/case_summaries/people-v-gerber/

> As the United States Supreme Court found in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002) 535 U.S. 234, 250-251, “[v]irtual child pornography is not ‘intrinsically related’ to the sexual abuse of children . . .. ” The nexus between such images and exploitation of children is “contingent and indirect.” The images created by Gerber is akin to virtual child pornography since the superimposing of a childs head on adult pornographic images does not involve the sexual exploitation of an actual child. Thus, mere possession of them is protected under the First Amendment.

Thanks, I was trying to Google that and it was inconclusive. I didn't see the one you linked.

Laws do nothing without people who believe in them (just like they believe any other idol), or profit from them, or make an excuse that they are getting paid to enforce them, therefore “it is OK”.

People should be pre-conditioned to lose their marbles at the mere idea of someone being naked, and rush to the saviours in power as a consequence. It is not universal, there are many places where people are not trained by hyper-sexualised culture to treat children as sexual objects first and foremost (of course, it's always because of some “other” maniacs “everywhere”). That does not mean that those places are “better” or “safer”, just not that crazy.

In simple terms, viewers taught how to feel by the Jerry Springer Show (and by that I mean all “respectable” globalised media together, the difference is superficial) put on the cork hats, and dictate how everyone else should act. All while being 100% sure they are “progressive”, unlike those “savages”.

Obviously, certain people really like that they can keep any international hosting company, or business in general, on a leash, and they like it to be that way forever, so it's essential that you keep supporting the hypocrisy.

For specifically sexually explicit stuff, it's because chargebacks are __significantly__ higher for these types of purchases. High enough that it messes with the credit and counterparty risk modeling that processors use. You can use your imagination to come up with many reasons these result in more chargebacks than normal purchases.

Theoretically, they could just split out "explicit" vs "normal" risk categories, but there's two top problems there: 1) it's just fundamentally a smaller-yet-way-more-annoying category than the rest of their payments, and 2) tons of your partners (banks etc etc) have blanket-banned for all of the above reasons.

So... here we are.

This is the common explanation I see when this topic comes up, but it always made zero sense to me. It frustrates me that people fail to realize the amount of purchaseable things that could qualify as 'explicit'. This is Kickstarter. Do we really think that someone crowdfunding a risque board game or comic is as likely to ask for a chargeback as some middle-aged man trying to hastily cancel a subscription on some porn site?

And there's just so many more things you can pay for. Physical stuff. Art prints and comics. Game mods. Art commissions. Services that aren't just video platforms (social media, hookup apps and so on). There's so much more stuff out there that's not child-friendly, and I bet that all of these categories have different amounts of financial risk atrached to them.

So why are all these different things grouped under the widest net, with the worst offenders being used as reason to deny processing to the entire market segment? Why did they ban all explicit content and not just porn site subscriptions or whatever else has the most chargebacks?

This comment thread is confidently trying to steer around this topic, but there is ideology mixed up in this, and probably to a way larger extent than you think.

Note that, under my reading of these rules, Baldur's Gate 3 would not be allowed on Kickstarter. Nor would Mass Effect, since it has "sex acts or implied sex acts" (depending on what they mean by "implied").

Why are they casting such wide net? I’ve always wondered the same thing, my experience with adult content in the digital advertising world is that there’s a group dynamic that emerges and all but erases the “political will” that would cause certain businesses to make the first move in clearly defining what they carve out categories are, so it all backslides into fairly broad categories. It’s lot of heat in some scenarios and it paralyzes companies (motives varying depending on market position and situation of course)

How do you define the difference between explicit content and porn?

When we're talking about the examples people bring up in this comment section to illustrate high chargeback rates ("Uncle Derek bought a $500 subscription in a stupor and his wife is about to find out"), the definition would be something like "live action video recordings of humans engaged in sexual activities". Explicit content is a superset of that, also including all the other examples I gave.

Note that I'm not saying we should ban that. I'm just saying that if the 'unbearably high chargeback' excuse had merit, they would've been precision-striking just those categories of sales, instead of opting to nuke everything that humans find sexual, regardless of medium, type of product/service, artistic merit, popularity and so on.

>For specifically sexually explicit stuff, it's because chargebacks are __significantly__ higher for these types of purchases.

This has always been a lie. I work preventing stolen credit cards from being used to buy gift cards.

Payment networks do not at all care about cutting you off for having chargeback heavy flow. They demonstrate their value to customers by supporting those chargebacks, they make $20 for every single one. If you have a large fraction of your payments causing chargebacks, they just charge you more money for the privilege. They won't cut you off unless you are obviously not doing anything to prevent credit card fraud or are party to the actual fraud itself. Payment networks don't even do that much to prevent fraud, because it doesn't hurt their business at all. Everyone knows you are protected when you use a credit card, and frequent demonstrations help that.

This has always come down to some fundamentalist "Christian" groups who keep spending big bucks suing anyone they can find who sells anything adult, and suing Visa and Mastercard as accessories. They are trying to ban porn, toys, adult content in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...

This is the group that drove Pornhub to delete 9/10ths of their library.

Compare their efforts to the australian group who got so much flak for demanding steam remove violently rapey games and yet are fine with steam still being full of sexually explicit games that aren't about simulating abuse.

I can't understand why people believe this lie. If it were true, you would not be able to buy a gift card over the internet at all.

> They are trying to ban porn, toys, adult content in general.

They see all LGBT stuff as porn. Which is why the current moral panic in US/UK involves transgender people. Once trans people are outlawed, the rest of the rainbow will be rounded up and eliminated.

> You can use your imagination to come up with many reasons these result in more chargebacks than normal purchases.

No I can't. Can you elaborate?

The canonical example is person A buys some risque item, their partner sees the credit card statement says "what is this?", so then person A denies they made the purchase (because they are embarrassed), says it must be fraud, so then it gets charged back on the credit card.

They do not have SMS OTP confirmation for bank card purchases? It is much more difficult to deny anything when there is a record of delivered SMS message along with phone identifier and precise location.

User uses a credit card, either a legitimate one or a stolen one, to buy access to a site. They download all the content that their purchase gives them access to. Then they (or the card's legitimate owner) initiate a chargeback. They "lose access to" the site but they already have everything that's there for free, and they add it to their library of other stolen content.

I really struggle with realistic use cases for stablecoin payments (many are more gee-whiz party tricks or they are reinventing the problems of traditional finance but on a blockchain) but adult content / tipping is an interesting one... small transaction size + high chargeback rate, feels ripe for this

I wish they could just raise the fees to account for the chargebacks so at least it's not banned entirely.

So is this specifically for "MILFs/DILFs" or "buttocks"?

Because this is too specific for your understanding of the reasons to be true. They'd just blanket ban anything NSFW.

>it's because chargebacks

Sorry, but that's just bullshit. This is nothing more than your standard pseudogovernmental meddling in the "just build your own financial infrastructure" vein, and it's coming from foreign countries this time rather than the US itself (it currently has an administration less hostile to business).

Then why there are chargebacks in the first place? Allow merchants to have no chargeback policy.

What merchant wants to have chargebacks? They exist for consumer protection not for the seller's benefit.

US federal laws mandate chargebacks as a consumer protection mechanism, primarily through the Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA) of 1974 and Regulation Z of the Truth in Lending Act (TILA)

Why does this not apply to payment methods like Zelle?

Zelle is (in effect) a wire transfer - there is no "credit" (meaning "borrow now, pay later") for that law to apply.

To expand a little on this, Zelle and debit card transactions are covered under Regulation E: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/100... . So there’s a codified procedure for disputes, it’s just a little less consumer friendly.

Patio11 has a fantastic writeup on exactly this: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/regulation-e/

In the US can you use stripe with only online bank transfers just like in the EU?

The US doesn't really do bank transfers the way we do here.

There's CashApp / Venmo / Zelle, previously Paypal, for P2P transfers (paying your friend for a half of the pizza you both just ate), but that's largely an internet phenomenon. There are wire transfers, but those are expensive and largely for big-ticket items you don't buy that often, think cars or houses, not TVs. There are ACH transfers, which is how wages and bills often work. The fun part of ACH is that the person executing the transfer doesn't have to be the account owner, so businesses can just transfer bill payments from your account to theirs. And then there are the famous checks, which work when no other option is available.

Non-purchase person-to-business transaction are largely done via credit card, sometimes by check or ACH. Explicitly instructing your bank to send a transfer to an account number provided by the business, either through a form or through a "quick transfer" UI, is very rare on that side of the pond.

While the executives have their own biases, suing Visa/Mastercard, and damaging their reputation, became a strategy to attack pornography in-general:

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/suing-visa-to-shut-down-por... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/04/visa-suspends-card-payments-...

And yes, naturally this is backed by the Christian right. They've tried to spin/redefine the whole anti-porn thing as anti-child trafficking, as that has more support.

The last thing the Christian Right want is financial records of their spending.

The payment processors say the reason is high fraud and charge-back rates in those industries that make it unprofitable to service. I don't know if this is true or an excuse. Either way, its an excellent reason why this critical infrastructure shouldn't be under corporate control.

Ask the Canadian truckers how well government control of banking worked out ;)

Seriously though, I think the fix here is not who controls it but legislation that codifies when this type of payment deplatforming can (or cannot) be done. Make some carve-outs for smaller processors (e.g. if your church group wants to set up a pr0n-free version of Stripe, go to town)

Crypto didn’t help the truckers either.. Trudeau banned it, which is ironic considering the whole point of it was being government resistant.

Well that is fair point, but cannot they just increase the commission to cover them? Also I think it is weird that when someone steals a bank card, they use it to buy adult games instead of buying an iPhone or MacBook and shipping it to the third world country.

They do! It's called a high risk merchant account. Their payment processor would do it: https://stripe.com/ie/resources/more/high-risk-merchant-acco...

> Also I think it is weird that when someone steals a bank card, they use it to buy adult games instead of buying an iPhone or MacBook and shipping it to the third world country.

iPhone or MacBook purchases are expensive enough to trigger fraud detection reliably. A $19.99 adult content purchase less likely to.

It's not just stolen credit cards, though. Adult content purchases have another problem where purchasers often deny having made the purchase when their significant other finds it on the credit card statement. Shaggy's "It wasn't me" defense.

> Adult content purchases have another problem where purchasers often deny having made the purchase when their significant other finds it on the credit card statement. Shaggy's "It wasn't me" defense.

Ridiculous. People who consume adult content could at least behave like adults.

Most of them do.

It's a math problem: If a credit card processor takes 3% of the purchase price and the average purchase is small like a $10 item or a $5 monthly commitment, it doesn't take many disputes to blow up their business model. Disputes are costly because you have to pay humans to deal with paperwork and phone calls.

Why do you believe this?

They charge you a large fee for every chargeback. They get the full purchase price of the transaction back without any effort. It's automatic. Meanwhile your merchant fee per transaction is directly tied to how many chargebacks you produce.

Chargebacks do not cost the payment network any money at all. All cost is borne by the merchants. That's the whole point. That's why chargebacks are effective: Because the payment network is an all powerful authority in the matter and has no incentive to deny chargebacks.

Stripe has a $15 chargeback fee last time I worked on this.

If you believe $15 covers all of the human labor involved plus the cost of their management chain and employment, I wish I could be as optimistic as labor costs as you.

Is consuming "adult" content behaving like an adult or a hedonistic teenager?

They could, as soon as people who police the consumptino of adult content behave like adults.

That, and hormone-filled teenagers (ab)using their parents credit cards. This is called friendly fraud, which is also the reason why some gaming items are higher risk than one would naively expect.

Like when Runescape allowed you to purchase membership via a premium rate number. Lots of fraud going on back when that was a thing and a big part of why it's no longer a thing.

I see random offhand unsubstantiated online comments here and there including here on HN, that 1) chargeback rates of porn, games, and digital contents are significantly lower than anything else, and 2) credit card companies already charge higher fees for porn despite that.

Combined with prevalence of the suspiciously well standardized "because porn users and gamers chargeback Steam purchases way too often" canned responses, I think it's just an excuse, if not "the" excuse somewhere - like the basis for using incorrect data for internal risk modeling or something like that.

I've seen the chargeback rates, they are low. Consider that most adult consumers are repeat purchasers (subscribing to their favorite artist/dev/performer). They do not want to get banned for a chargeback and lose out on content! Most adult content creators also have friendly voluntary refund policy when requested. So chargeback rates are very low in adult.

Meanwhile other industries like travel have crazy high chargeback rates. This is because it is notorious for a no refund policy / locking customers into purchases months in advance... and then people just chargeback instead of accepting a consumer hostile no refund policy. So travel ends up having high chargebacks... and yet has minimal trouble getting processing.

> So travel ends up having high chargebacks... and yet has minimal trouble getting processing.

Nope, not true. They're #2 on Stripe's high risk business list, after porn:

https://stripe.com/resources/more/high-risk-merchant-account...

It's not people using stolen cards, it's people feeling shame or regret after making an intentional purchase and using chargebacks to "undo" the purchase

> It's not people using stolen cards, it's people feeling shame or regret after making an intentional purchase and using chargebacks to "undo" the purchase

If this problem were as pervasive as people keep saying it is, it would put the merchants out of business long before it would have any noticeable impact on the card brands (Visa, Mastercard) who are typically the ones actually pushing bans like these[0]. Even if the merchant is successful in winning the chargeback, they are the ones who have to pay the fees for it, which means that any business with a predictable and consistently high enough chargeback rate will just stop collecting payments long before the upstream providers care.

A lot of people here don't actually understand how payment processing, risk underwriting, and chargebacks work - which is fair, because it's an arcane area of knowledge that most people don't interact with! But it means that a lot of things which sound like simple and easy explanations are actually completely off base and nonsensical.

[0] I do not have knowledge of the Kickstarter situation specifically, and the article is light on primary-source details, so I am explicitly not commenting on this specific case.

I don't think it's so much a religious lobbying thing as it is a consent and liability thing.

If you're a processor (payment or otherwise), you have to be absolutely sure there's no CP or non-consensual content on there. The penalty for even one thing to slip through is damning, and they're under extreme pressure to be the gatekeeper on all of this.

That means you have to manually review everything. That means paying someone to sit through and review all sorts of... questionable... media. A lot of work was shipping this off to overseas review farms. And we occasionally hear reports on how degrading and traumatizing this kind of work can be.

So for Visa, Mastercard, et al I think they are more or less chomping at the bit to just be completely out of this genre of businesses.

They're also attacking games and artwork -- gotta make sure those pixels consent, too. Sigh...

Article and comments are underrating the impact of reputational risk on payment processors and on Kickstarter itself, for hosting/facilitating sexual content.

Some amount of adult comment is CSAM, or otherwise broadly disfavored. Some companies (Pornhub, OnlyFans) are willing to specialize in discriminating between “regular” adult content and the objectionable stuff, and they have payment processors similarly willing to specialize.

Some of that specialization involves being willing to take on political exposure. Mainstream payment processors are unusually exposed to risks like “being dragged in front of Congress” — there are a lot of reasons a politician might want to put pressure on a general financial infrastructure provider. So reducing obvious ways to get embarrassingly dragged in front of Congress is rational.

Thanks, this is a better summary of the situation than all the people claiming it’s chargebacks (no longer such an issue as it used to be).

The problem is that activists who are laser focused on eliminating adult content watch intently for the first thing they can use against the company, and even if it violates their ToS something problematic is eventually bound to get through review. Rather than reporting it to the platform, activists then threaten the platform through intermediaries and force them to change their policies to drop adult content.

> The problem is that activists who are laser focused on eliminating adult content watch intently for the first thing they can use against the company, and even if it violates their ToS something problematic is eventually bound to get through review.

This is why Pornhub is always targeted under the pretense of "fighting CSAM" when in reality Facebook is orders of magnitude worse in terms of the prevalence of CSAM and the distribution.

Exodus Cry, et. al. don't target Facebook, because they don't actually care about fighting CSAM - they are simply weaponizing that rhetoric in order to attack the the thing they really want to end (pornography, and more broadly, anything "immoral" according to a right-wing, evangelical definition of that word).

I think Mastercard and Visa are deathly afraid of having their nice duopoly regulated more tightly (as is already done in the EU) and therefore they consequentially put in a lot of effort to steer clear of topics that would give politicians a good excuse to do so.

It's not religion, it's litigation and money.

1) non-consensual or illegal (CP) content could come with expensive lawsuits.

2) Adult content has higher abuse (charge-backs, fraud, etc..).

You forgot intense lobbying efforts funded by conservative groups and billionaires.

Yeah I’m sure Jeff Bezos is kept awake at night by thoughts of payment processors processing adult related transactions

So you are ignorant to what Moms for Liberty have done and who funds them. This is public info.

So because a billionaire donated to this pac that means “billionaires” as a group are responsible for this? That’s like saying black people are responsible for electing Trump because >= 1 black person voted for him.

Your ignorance continues. Some of the billionaires fund it via intermediary organizations like Heritage Foundation. They are quite organized and not only acting as individuals.

How are they organized? Are you implying that all billionaires are in agreement to fund the heritage foundation? Lol

Heritage Foundation is one of the ways that several of them organize. It's an organization

Where did I say all? Lol

Black people are responsible for electing trump because of the black conservative federation

See how your logic makes zero sense?

> why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune

They're not. I highly recommend the podcast "Hot Money: who rules porn". It's about the internet "revolution" of porn, when it went from DVD to the Internet. It's very interesting and sometimes hilarious.

4 fingers are OK. 5 fingers are NOT. The payment card cartel has an unofficial list of what is and isn't OK to show. It becomes a different act when all fingers are involved and they don't want that. I kid you not.

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/hot-money/hot-money-who-rule...

> Also this is why we should work to increase circulation of cryptocurrency. No stupid religious restrictions and stupid political sanctions.

In order to increase circulation of cryptocurrencies, you must make it easy and secure to deal in them. The way you do that is through... political sanctions in the form of financial and banking regulations.

Which are set by bodies vulnerable to religious pressures.

> Why payment processors do it?

Short answer — there are lots of chargebacks and (sometimes) fraud around this content. Vanilla payment processors don’t like high rates of chargebacks and fraud.

> Also why PornHub and OnlyFans are immune to religious lobby?

They use a high-risk payment processor that takes a much higher cut of each sale (basically as insurance).

I don't know the specific cause. However, as such, it is a moral issue, not a religious one per se. Pornography is abusive and incredibly damaging to individuals and society and thus the common good. It is entirely reasonable even for governments to take measures to restrict or ban the production and sale of such content.

Opposition to such measures often hinges on false notions of freedom and the purpose of law. One function of law is to teach men to be free in the genuine sense, not as being able to do what thou wilt, but to be able to do what you ought.

There's a reason pornography has a history as an instrument of wartime psyops.

I think grouping all porn as exploitative is a stretch.

> false notions of freedom

Like freedom from want and freedom from fear, Mr. Roosevelt?

> Why payment processors do it? Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? Strong church lobby? Legal risks? I think its mostly religious groups who who are against adult content and sex, or there are other groups?

The driving force is mostly a group of nonprofits and lobbying groups that are backed by right-wing, mostly-but-not-exclusively evangelicals.

Over the last decade, they have successfully laundered their views into the mainstream to the point where many people don't realize how influential they have been in writing all of these laws and policies and driving them across the finish line.

None of this is hidden knowledge - they've been acting out in the open for years, but people have an aversion to acknowledging it, because it's an uncomfortable truth which triggers a great deal of cognitive dissonance.

> Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions?

It's not easy money. It's reputationally risky money, that requires EXPENSIVE moderation, defensive litigation potentially fraught with fraud and chargebacks. Follow the money.

Can’t they use some push payment methods where a qr gets scanned to send money, like venmo/cashspp?

Practically, adult content has a lot of chargebacks. I can understand not wanting to deal with that out of the box, especially in the context of kickstarter.

You seem to suppose that those businesses are really independent, only focus on goals they advertise, and exist in a vacuum. I can't even imagine how many “services” they offer to governments to keep their market shares.

The non-government organisations involved in those cases are either proxies that always support local politicians, or have been deliberately created to create opaque decision making source that is outside of legal or public scrutiny. As always, the ones who decide morals for the masses are the ones you can not even criticise. Unfortunately, even if you don't have such activist group, there is always a queue of well-intentioned citizens full of dreams of getting in bed with any politician, and having their 15 minutes of fame.

So one thing is to show who is the boss. Just as a slave owner who randomly kills a couple of slaves just to make others tremble in fear, US reminds others who sets the rules of international trade. The pretext is not that important.

Another is to keep public in check. A citizen who says “Sonic and Mario BDSM Chamber game? Wow, so unbelievable”, and shrugs it off is a bad citizen. Good citizens must react as prescribed to any real or imagined horror stories, be attracted to sexual content in media (or outraged by it, which is the same thing), and always fear the dangers that exist “outside”. The more they do that, the more they ignore the real world around them, and rely on imaginary protections the system and its members provide.

As political entertainers are interested in keeping the status quo that benefits all of them, they always choose the lowest common denominator views on such topics. It does not matter what you really think about it, it matters that you do the trick when the command is given: gasp with others, murmur with others, shake your head with others, decide that it must be stopped by existing powers with others (and therefore let them decide for you).

PornHub was famously not immune to the same thing. Porn industry attacked free streaming sites to remove everything that was not actively copyrighted, and directly provided by industry. It probably cost them a lot to organise that through politicians, journalists, activists — and payment processors. Ironically, the rhetoric you might call religious was used to help porn business.

This religious lobby idea you have is hardly a real thing in the way you seem to imagine it being.

Collective Shout is behind several major campaigns.

Info on its conservative lobbyist leader, their extreme views and hypocrisies: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/s/1FHaaaIs6T

As for why they do it?

Because conservative Christian lobbying is a lucrative grift: https://youtu.be/ms26YefUNds?si=3KLCj1RALES3aKDT

The owner runs a for-profit speaking engagement business alongside the registered charity. Many such people get into right wing politics without necessarily holding real conviction for the causes because it’s an easy way to get lots of money.

It’s kind of like the market for drill music - fans love the stories of gang violence and aura of lawlessness, so artists will exaggerate and pretend or even foment actual violence so the market buys the product they’re looking for regardless of authenticity. The fans form the artists because of what they finance. The result is a product of the fandom more than a reflection of the artists true selves, though it relies on preserving the deception of extreme authenticity.

A similar American lobbyist group is Moms for Liberty. They’re funded by a billionaire and groups like the Heritage Foundation, the ones behind Project 2025.

And they're Australian, not American.

Collective Shout is Australian, but there are plenty of similar groups in the US , UK, and Europe.

The left-right coalition against porn makes relief for Kickstarter or Stripe unlikely.

FOSTA-SESTA, the law that increased liability for platforms facilitating porn, passed 388-25 in the House and 97-2 in the Senate back in 2018. Every senate Progressive except one voted yes, including Sanders, Warren, Kamala Harris (AG against Backpage), Booker, etc. Anti-trafficking feminist groups like NOW backed that legislation, or were silent on it. Similarly, media outlets were either quiet or in vocal support, i.e., the NYTimes 2020 attack on Pornhub.

Thanks for this comment. This is a bipartisan movement

"Forced to ban adult content by payment processors"

If you go through and click all the links and hunt down the source, the final source underlying it all is a comic author who says, without quoting anything, or any proof, that that's the reason why. Just a random guy saying that Stripe made them ban it, without any evidence.

I'm the King of England. There, I guess I "am" the King of England, because all it takes is for a random person to make a statement and it becomes true.

The details sure are light, but it tracks with how banks and processors work. There's lots of indirect language and polite pressure involved, and famously, opaqueness behind decisions.

Consider this excellent article on debanking by an author who works at Stripe: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

The machine grinds on regardless if we agree with it or not.

>>There, I guess I "am" the King of England, because all it takes is for a random person to make a statement and it becomes true.

Sir/Ma'am, this is HN, we dont actually read the articles here. WE just look at the title and get outraged

His(?) Majesty. You are addressing the King of England himself

It feels like there's been a significant cinching of personal rights recently. I wonder if it has anything to do with crypto's relatively recent adoption by institutional movers. NordVPN offers crypto payments, I expect virtually every other operator would too. Seems like a good way to get adoption rolling. Tunnel to somewhere that providers will service without an ID check and stay more anonymous by the dint of the crypto exchange.

Maybe I'm trippin.

This is the least of my concerns with Kickstarter. It’s so trivial to completely scam an entirely fake campaign, with zero repercussions, that no one should take this site seriously at all. I say this as someone who has backed a campaign that posted updates and even claimed that shipments were out while all the comments were the same: I received nothing.

I think nobody is concerned about this because most campaigns just deliver what they promised.

Etsy used to be awesome, now it isn't. Lots of mass-produced junk played off as quality made-with-care-and-attention kinda stuff. It's even easier with AI images, videos, description and communications.

I think kickstarter is gonna have (or maybe already has?) a scam problem due to the rise of AI.

I've contributed to about 7 campaigns; only one didn't work out. But the person running it actually refunded me fully (about 200$) after 3 or 4 years of very occasional updates.

My friend Rainey Reitman's new book about this phenomenon came out last month:

https://raineyreitman.com/2024/06/11/transaction-denied-my-u...

The FT podcast series “Hot Money” season one explained a lot about this. Basically the payment card industry shapes what adult content is produced by governing the money flow.

https://www.ft.com/hot-money

So who is pressuring the processors?

The actual answer: hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bswuu1nfc040h... & https://finance.yahoo.com/news/visa-suspends-payments-for-ad...

> But he was friendly with Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga, whom he had met through a mutual friend. Ackman texted Banga, providing a link to Kristof’s story with his tweet: “Amex, VISA and MasterCard should immediately withhold payments or withdraw until this is fixed. PayPal has already done so.” (Ackman was unaware that American Express already did not allow its card to be used on adult sites.)

> Banga quickly wrote back: “We’re on it.”

> Then things began to move. Within days, Mastercard announced it had “instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance” of [PH] charges, saying it had found evidence of illegal activity and was continuing to investigate.

EDIT: The antisemitism in some replies is disgusting and I reject it entirely. This post is about a specific, publicly reported action by one individual, not about any religious or ethnic group. Any attempt to turn this into conspiracy-mongering is bigotry, not analysis. I don’t want that associated with my comment.

Huh, the same person who was behind crushing the campus protests & blacklisting/cancellation of protestors at Harvard that were in opposition to the Gaza genocide.

There isn't a single anti semitic comment in your replies, mind to link it?

The reply has been flagged/marked dead by HN since, and should at minimum auto-collapse (thus hiding even worse replies to it) regardless of your account's "showdead" settings. I'm not going to link to it, and it's not worth reading regardless.

It was flagged. I replied to it, you can get the gist of what it was based on my reply.

Here's the comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123664

Lots of anti porn groups out there that complain to them.

If you dig, this issue has been brewing for quite some time. Long story short, its the hard-right conservatives and/or Christians who demand everybody *else* follow their recidivist ethics.

Exodus Cry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry explicit christian thinktank

Collective Shout - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout not explicitly christian, but mirrors Exodus Cry almost verbatim

Going down the rabbit hole of Financial Censorship also shows a few other bad actor sin this space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_censorship

FiLiA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiLiA hard conservative feminist group, hates transgender

Morality in Media (renamed to "National Center on Sexual Exploitation" to deceive as federal org) - Intersection of Conservatives and Christians, wanting to ban anything their bronze age beliefs indicate are bad.

CATiW - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_Against_Trafficking_... , another far-conservative anti-trans hate group.

> Collective Shout was founded in 2009 by Melinda Tankard Reist, an Australian conservative political activist, writer, anti-abortion feminist and anti-pornography activist

So close

You have a clear history of anti-Christian sentiment on this site. Your comments repeatedly go beyond criticism of specific abuses and into broad hostility toward Christianity and Catholicism as such.

To be clear, its an anti-Abrahamic sentiment. This includes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We don't see much of Hinduism and Buddhism and Jainism where I'm at. And none of them are forcing their own religion as state/federal bills. (Although... India has a pretty bad Hindu nationalism problem, sigh.)

At least in the USA (where I live), the Christians cant seem to follow their own rules. Instead, they seek to force their rules on everyone by subverting government by aligning with republicans and creating voting blocs. Ive even had christians in my local community publicly tell people (in service) to vote for trump going back to 2015, and later in 2022-2023. -- back when it was expressly illegal to do such as a church.

I even had christian pastors publicly attack my MiL (she was a director for a local nonprofit). Called her the antichrist and a bunch of other shit. that spillover even hit my SO when they were doing in-home healthcare. Was chased out of their house with a crucifix wall hanging.

Of course, trump's IRS now made church-based political endorsement legal. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/11/irs-...

If they wanted to practice their own rules, I dont care. When they shift to forcing *me* to follow their rules, yeah, I'll be hostile.

> FiLiA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiLiA hard conservative feminist group, hates transgender

Your characterisation is way off the mark. FiLiA is an organisation run by left-wing feminists and their conferences cover a wide range of issues affecting women and girls.

I wasnt wrong about my assessment. FiLiA is:

Sex-work exclusionary. Like Trump's bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSTA-SESTA .

Trans-exclusionary. Like American Republicans' various anti-trans bills https://translegislation.com/

Encourages woman-based (trans-exclusive) laws that give them more "rights", rather than equal rights for everyone. We see this in countless US republican trans bills that protect "women", but not men.

Encourages separation of genders. Like how Mike Pence wouldnt be alone in a room with a woman other than his wife/daughter.

Sure, they're not a broad spectrum political org, but the areas where they speak in, is full of TERF and SWERF hatred. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.....

If you look at the details of what left-wing feminist organisations like FiLiA are advocating for and their motivations for doing so, it is very different to right-wing conservatives.

For instance, on "sex work", FiLiA favours the Nordic Model, where the punters are criminalised and prostituted women are offered support to help their exit from this abusive industry.

You generally will not find conservatives arguing for that.

Similarly for "trans", the motivation is to prevent the erasure of much-needed single-sex spaces, services and other provisions for women and girls.

Compare to conservatives who look at it mostly from the angle of men should be masculine and women should be feminine. Obviously not something that organisations like FiLiA would agree with, at all.

Based on how extreme your positions (and rhetoric) are, I would very much encourage you to go touch grass.

(Hint: trans stuff got us Trump winning again)

Stripe (their payment process) will service adult content sites. It's not actually banned, but if your business is involved in categories with high chargeback rates (travel, gambling, cryptocurrency, vaping, adult content) you have to pay higher fees to account for the higher fraud rate in those categories

https://stripe.com/ie/resources/more/high-risk-merchant-acco...

I applied to stripe recentlyish as an adult game project with excellent processing history and very low chargeback rate and got denied.

which is funny, because then they spin around and say they don't allow crowdfunding.

it's really asinine how stripe decides what is and what isn't allowed.

(see also: "oh, you linked your stripe to ko-fi? banned forever!" happened to me, it'll happen to you!)

Right-wing, openly evangelical groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media, who have an explicit agenda to ban pornography and see this as an easy "next step" towards that end goal.

They are also the groups behind the closure of big porn sites like XTube, the short-lived purge of adult content on OnlyFans (one of the few battles they lost), and the scourge of age verification bills that are sweeping the US, UK, and Europe.

The goal with age verification laws is not to protect minors or fight CSAM (as much as they pretend it is) - it's to make it expensive and difficult to legally serve content that they disapprove of, producing a chilling effect. Note that the content they disapprove of is not limited to pornography, which is why many of these bills have such vague language that can apply to other things like information on abortion, or LGBTQ+ themed material. This is not an accident; the supporters of these policies are quite open about their intention.

Disapproval is only the first step. After that you can start looking the other way in certain cases. Not always in exchange for the money, just for public reverence and praise, i. e. the symbols of power.

I’ve heard this is apparently less about morality and more about payments getting contested by men getting caught by their spouses

I don't have any data on this, so don't quote me on it at all, but this feels more like an excuse made up by paypros than an actual good explanation.

No one would have data on something like that! Wife finds out, husband says, someone stole my card! You expect them to own up later?

The reason doesn't matter, the data would be on the amount of chargebacks being made.

That's not the reason. Cost of chargebacks falls entirely on the merchant. Visa/MC have no reason to care.

What happens if the merchant folds or disappears? Stripe (or Visa or whoever) then are the bagholder. And if someone has a ton of chargebacks, it's not uncommon they're then difficult to collect from.

Then hold back a portion of funds in escrow.

Ah good job, you fixed it. I suggest you let Stripe and Visa know, I'm sure they'll be keen.

> I’ve heard this is apparently less about morality and more about payments getting contested by men getting caught by their spouses

This is a common myth. The concerted effort that we've seen over the last 5-10 years in particular is the direct consequence of intense lobbying from a handful of groups that are openly backed by or aligned with right-wing religious groups, especially (but not exclusively) evangelicals.

In case you have any doubts about whether "morality" is their motivation, one of the groups was literally called "Morality in Media", before renaming to the more official-sounding National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Despite the new name, they actually don't care very much about "sexual exploitation" as most reasonable people would define the term (such as child abuse) but instead consider all sex work to be "exploitation" and aim to ban legal sex work.

I've worked in this space. I feel like the statistics about chargebacks are thrown around because they sound like they could be real.

The real chargeback rate is actually incredibly low. Probably way less than Amazon or anyone selling physical objects.

Those people should have used cryptocurrencies.

You mean using currencies where all the transactions are public?

It’s not even that complex.

The chargeback rates might just be higher than the payment processors feel like dealing with.

I’m more than fine with more transactions leaving the traditional credit card system.

Giving Visa a 3% surcharge on the entire economy never felt right

Visa and Mastercard operate electronic payment networks for debit transactions, which are almost free, and would also be banned by this.

Leaving the only other electronic payment methods as ACH (which is not ideal for most businesses), Paypal, and I don’t know what else.

The idea is that chargeback rates are that high because of people getting caught by their spouses.

Conservative religious groups

Yup. I forget the exact name of the campaign - it was something like "twelve pillars" - but decades ago the religious right realized that they were losing everything in court and their candidates were wildly unpopular in elections. So they shifted to just infiltrating banking and forcing their moral superiority complex on everyone else that way.

That's why porn stars can't have checking accounts (and then become targets of property theft and violent crime - because the criminals know they are unbankable, so they have piles of cash around.)

Fun fact: the most "Christian" religious states have the highest rates of teen pregnancy, rape, divorce, murder, property crime, etc. Plus christian religious leaders seem to be attracted to child sexual abuse like Elmo is to piles of cocaine.

I feel like maybe one should focus on cleaning up one's own moral house and lead by example before screeching to everyone else that they're going to hell for jerking off to a picture of a naked man or woman on the interwebs.

It could be any link in the chain. They will never tell you though. It's the perfect unaccountability machine.

Banks

But who is pressuring the banks? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Banks frequently refuse to do business with, or heavily restrict, businesses that they deem risky from a financial perspective. Adult content, pharmaceuticals and travel are all industries that experience significantly higher occurrence of fraud and chargebacks than others. For example, your spouse sees a weird item on your credit card for a porn site. "Wasn't me! Must be stolen I'll report it." Sometimes it's the other direction. Travel businesses often get by on very thin margins with any significant balances due to deposits. If something happens, customers might get deposits back, or they might get chargebacks, and the business can rapidly end up deep in the red.

Often times to bank successfully you need large stagnant balances that are semi-frozen, or meaningful collateral.

This becomes problematic through payment provider platforms which other platforms build upon: it's not straightforward to manage these relationships through so many layers of abstractions. It's easier just to ban the industry.

I don't know the specifics of Kickstarter, but I've seen this happen countless times, so it's not difficult to connect the dots.

> Adult content, pharmaceuticals and travel are all industries that experience significantly higher occurrence of fraud and chargebacks than others. For example, your spouse sees a weird item on your credit card for a porn site. "Wasn't me! Must be stolen I'll report it." Sometimes it's the other direction.

No, it has nothing to do with chargebacks. It's not even presented that way in their policies when they ban it. They consider it a "brand risk", which is completely different.

I had an opportunity to see the real chargeback data for this type of content and it is not high. It's low. If any bank says they are refusing service because of chargebacks they are lying and using that as an excuse to cover some other reason.

I also remember a story from someone I worked with in the 90s. At that time there were adverts in the back of newspapers for VHS tapes, very cheap. It would say "Get these 8 HOT VHS tapes for $4.99 inc shipping." People would call up and order on their credit card. The reality was the company would only send out a handful of these packages and then claim to be out-of-stock, then they would mail a refund check out to everyone else. The check would be from BIG TITTY BUSTY WHORES LLC or something. Literally nobody would cash the check.

For some types of explicit content, sure, I don't disagree. I've seen instances where "fraud" was used as an excuse for an otherwise unpalatable brand.

There hasn't been sufficient reporting on all the lobbying and back-room dealing.

> There hasn't been sufficient reporting on all the lobbying and back-room dealing.

There has been tons of reporting on this in the industry. It is not hidden. The war on sex work is extremely well-documented, as is the explicit shift in tactics to targeting financial infrastructure as a tactic.

What I'm trying to say is that the industry reporting isn't percolating up to e.g. TFA, which makes no mention of any of this.

Every time my credit card number was stolen, it was used to buy sneakers. I think this isn't uncommon but there's no blanket rule against sneaker sales.

This hand-waving about fraud is complete nonsense.

The banking industry shrieks about fraud and chargebacks yet gyms, which are basically the scummiest retail businesses on the planet aside from payday lenders, are allowed to use the ACH system and get direct access to money, not credit - that is a royal pain in the ass to revoke?

So much so that my state has an entire set of laws devoted toward curtailing the gym industry's various shitty cancellation policies? I believe they're even prohibited from requiring ACH payment - they must offer other options.

And what about all the local newspapers that make it impossible to cancel? Or all the made-for-TV product companies?

Brick and mortar is a whole different ballgame.

[retracted]

I think the pressure is just coming from behind the scenes.

The religious right knows many of their views are unpopular so they don't act in the open. They find underhanded ways to force their views onto us. Abortion bans wouldn't survive a simple up and down vote in almost any state, yet abortion bans are happening across the country.

The religious right really has their claws into this administration, and the far right has a much larger say in things than it seems like they would based on their proportional representation in the population. Things like gerrymandering and closed primaries don't help.

October 2021, Mastercard unilaterally imposes additional constraints on adult sites: https://www.commercegate.com/mastercard-issued-an-updated-se...

August 2021: OnlyFans CEO Blames Porn Ban on 'Unfair Actions' of Banks, Media: https://www.pcmag.com/news/onlyfans-ceo-blames-porn-ban-on-u...

April 2024: Japanese Adult content platform DLsite disables Visa/Mastercard payment after attempt to outsmart credit card companies: https://automaton-media.com/en/news/dlsite-disables-visa-mas...

It's not a sudden new thing. The financial theory seems to explain all the facts.

> It's not a sudden new thing. The financial theory seems to explain all the facts.

Literally all three of the examples you list were the direct result of lobbying from groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media. These campaigns had been in the works for years, and were well-known to people in the industry, who had been sounding the alarm for years.

It's maddening that people not only refuse to listen before the actions come down, but also still refuse to connect the dots even after they happen.

OK, I've checked that claim more carefully and confirmed it to my satisfaction. Comments retracted. Left my links up in the GP comment for context for yours.

Thank you - appreciate you being willing to correct that.

Literally all of those happened within the past 5 years. DLsite had been operating for a long time taking credit cards before that happened.

It is actually a relatively new thing, and it is from religious groups lobbying and gaining more political power.

> The religious right knows many of their views are unpopular so they don't act in the open. They find underhanded ways to force their views onto us. Abortion bans wouldn't survive a simple up and down vote in almost any state, yet abortion bans are happening across the country.

They do act out in the open! That's why it's so maddening to see how pervasive the belief that this isn't a push from right-wing groups is. They are extremely open about their goals and about their ideological alignment, and they have been at literally every step in the process.

They're telegraphing every single move in real-time. But for some reason, people just don't really want to believe it.

It turns out, the best way to get away with a heinous agenda is not to hide it, but to be completely open and direct about it. If you tell people exactly what they want and it's horrific enough, they will refuse to believe it's true, because nobody would be that cartoonishly villainous, right?

The sex industry isn't the only area where that principle works, although (like with many "technologies") it was one of the first where it was successfully applied.

FOSTA-SESTA is the source of this. A well intentioned bill, that, once again, has unintended consequences beyond it's original intention.

Mastercard/Visa/Banks don't want legal liability.

> FOSTA-SESTA is the source of this. A well intentioned bill, that, once again, has unintended consequences beyond it's original intention.

You're right that these are connected to FOSTA/SESTA, but you're missing the actual connection.

FOSTA/SESTA were not "well-intentioned". They were the product of lobbying from explicitly religious, anti-sex, anti-pornography groups. Those same groups are behind recent campaigns to require providing government ID to access pornography, to allow attorneys general to prosecute LGBTQ content, and to ban pornography from platforms like Steam and Itch.io.

FOSTA/SESTA have worked exactly as they were intended to! The intention was to make it harder to conduct sex work legally and safely, and they accomplished that goal!

These policies have little to do with FOSTA/SESTA themselves, in that the text of those laws has no bearing here. But those bills were the first big, national victory of these campaigns, and they used that momentum to raise absurd amounts of money to lobby for the other laws mentioned above, and to target financial infrastructure as an easy point of leverage to accomplish their goal of banning pornography across the Internet.

Those bills are the reasons banks/credit card companies are pushing this since it holds them liable.

> Those bills are the reasons banks/credit card companies are pushing this since it holds them liable.

You are either misreading those bills or confusing them with other similar bills which did target banking infrastructure (and which thankfully did not pass).

FOSTA/SESTA did increase liability for platforms, but the applicability of those laws to this specific case is minimal to nonexistent.

Banks didn't do this before 2018 as aggressively. Reputational stuff is always been there and chargebacks have always been there. This law is why they've been so aggressive over the last few years. There's nothing else that has changed

> This law is why they've been so aggressive over the last few years. There's nothing else that has changed

There is so much that has changed! If you think FOSTA/SESTA are the only thing that have changed, you're clearly not up to date on this topic!

> Banks didn't do this before 2018 as aggressively

Because after FOSTA/SESTA passed in 2018, the groups that lobbied for it started targeting financial infrastructure as the front in their war. This is not some secret; they've been very open about it and their lobbying efforts have been extremely well-documented.

Question: what prevents an organisation like Kickstarter from using more than one payment processor, including the ones used by actual porn companies?

I worked for a payment processor in Europe, we provided SEPA and some other payments, but not card payments (so there could be some difference).

Difference is in fees and licenses. Payment processors that process high risk payments (adult industry, gambling, etc...) have higher fees and need license from governing body (usually a national bank in country where the payment processor is registered). So if you process high risk payments as low risk you will get a fine from governing body and you risk to lose your license. And if you don't have a license for high risk payments you cannot process them.

I don't work there anymore, but I heard they lost SEPA license a couple of years ago because of risky transactions.

Now I am not sure if Visa and Master are forcing payment providers to give up high risk transactions or if they are forcing them to classify all transactions as low/high risk.

The pressure comes down through processors from Visa/MC. The new processor you sign up for gets the same phone call and give into the same set of demands, like a clockwork. The alternative has to be something that consumers of your product can handle that don't go through the CC infra, one that this caller don't have the numbers for.

It could be through vouchers sold at gas stations, bank transfers, QR payment apps, etc. But CC has by far the best penetration and most alternatives are weak at best.

If you do figure out the alternative payment or distribution strategy immune to pressure through CC, then it changes targets to legal systems and NGOs. You'd want couples of congresspeople or to push back on that front.

There are none that are reliably usable by actual porn companies at this moment. Check pornhub, you can only subscribe to them via bitcoin and direct bank payments.

> Question: what prevents an organisation like Kickstarter from using more than one payment processor, including the ones used by actual porn companies?

The way the policies work, they would either have to use the latter processor for all transactions (which would be prohibitively expensive) or relegate all "adult" content to a completely separate company and domain, which would be a huge pain and expense to operate for something that constitutes a relatively small fraction of their business.

Nothing prevents them, and some companies that want to support both adult and non-adult content do. But it's also reasonable for Kickstarter to decide that adult content is not so important to them that they want to jump through hoops to dodge Stripe's rules.

What I have heard before is that the processors don’t want to be associated with the sites at all, even indirectly, so unless the content is banned from the site entirely they will pull service.

The fact that if they don't ban it, Visa and Mastercard will blacklist them and they have 99% of the market share.

Is that really a fact?

That's what I want to know.

There should be a national payment processing operator as an alternative to VISA/MC. Just like they do it in many other countries.

A national public payment processor in the US would not be more immune to political pressure from religious moralist groups than a duopoly of private processors.

For evidence see, well, all the other institutions of the US federal government.

Well, at least such pressure will be well documented and there will be legal avenues of controlling those.

We have one in Russia, called Mir (world/peace, somewhat ironically). While, yes, there was literally zero downtime on card payments when Visa and MC left the country, they are still irreplaceable for international payments. As a result, everyone who needs to make them or travels a lot has a foreign bank account now, with, you guessed it, a Visa or MC card.

Edit: forgot to say, Mir cards used to work in a few other countries, for example, Turkey and Armenia. But eventually the US government pressured the banks in those countries to stop accepting Mir, because apparently that would somehow help defeat Putin or something.

Has Mir in the past ever implemented any kind of bans or restrictions for specific vendors or use cases?

None I'm aware about. But there's a growing list of things that the government itself considers straight up "extremist" or other forms of forbidden, so it doesn't get to the payment processor banning them.

I mean, that sounds like the best of both worlds

Then government leaders would be less able to circumvent civil rights and transparency measures (where those exist). That is why the government farms out infrastructure to non government entities.

This way, there is always a threat of businesses deciding not to do business with you by unaccountable forces.

>This way, there is always a threat of businesses deciding not to do business with you by unaccountable forces.

Visa/Mastercard vs the government itself is bordering on a distinction without a difference.

From the perspective of the average business or person they're both wholly unaccountable.

If you're Kickstarter or some Megacorp, well then it probably just depends which you have more friends in high places.

This is what the Digital Euro is supposed to be.

VISA is the government

When inequality is high capital is the government.

actually if they were it would be easier to argue it's a violation of free speech, but since they're not they can censor with much less restriction

tbh there's a case to be made that the government should run a payment processor as critical infrastructure

The way governments these days use corporations and NGOs to work around constitutional restrictions, I'm sure they're pretty happy leaving the payment processors as-is.

They actually just got slapped for doing this. This was in the area of speech but hopefully it’s the start of a larger trend. https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/us-government-concede...

Lol, let me know when a federal administration admits wrongdoing against speech it dislikes. In the meantime this is no different than one side saying "we tax the rich too much" and the other side saying "we don't tax the rich enough."

If they can make laws and people are subject to those laws, then they are government.

I only disagree with the "the" on the GP, they are para-governamental.

it's not a law though, it's a choice of who to do business with

Eh... Go read the article again, or just the title.

no need, these are two businesses making business decisions... specifically not being government allows them to do this

What does this even mean? VISA is literally a publicly traded company. Compared to banks it barely even regulated.

Really? I thought the subtext is as obvious as it could've been. The point they're making is that a duopoly that controls the flow of money itself deciding to ban a whole market segment for ideological or profit reasons is no different from a government making that thing actually illegal, in terms of the effect it has on businesses and people.

The usual explanation in these threads are "chargebacks", but come on. Payment processors could deal with chargebacks and disputes just fine. They suck for the seller, not the credit card company.

What US companies are afraid of more is PR and regulatory risk. Zelle has no chargeback process, but still bans the sale of automatic knives, fireworks, ammo, and firearm parts. Venmo bans a nebulous category of "products that present a risk to consumer safety". You better not be buying any vintage lawn darts for your collection.

The chargeback rate on knives or firearm optics is probably not any higher than on anything else. What's higher is the likelihood of a headline along the lines of "kid dead / injured because of Paypal". And so, we end up with digital payment processors as the arbiters of morality.

Seems like there has to be a tipping point coming soon where stuff like monero will start to make sense for "normal" people.

Headline is misleading on multiple levels.

Kickstarter already banned pornographic content before this. They expanded the rules to include more specifics. That's it. That's the story. Everything else is speculation and anger-mongering.

> While the previous version of the page simply prohibited “Pornographic content,” it now contains some oddly specific restrictions, including, but not limited to, “implied sex acts,” “MILF/DILF” content, “implied nudity,” and anything featuring “female nipples/areolas, genitalia,” and “anuses.” Good heavens, they’ve even banned “buttocks.”

The article quotes some speculation from some other blog that is trying to link this to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel for maximum anger points:

> Why? According to a report by The Daily Cartoonist, Kickstarter may be under pressure from its payment processor, Stripe, which Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel and X proprietor Elon Musk partially own. Kickstarter and Stripe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However Stripe actually does service adult content sites. It just falls into a category of high-risk merchants that also includes travel sites, cryptocurrency, gambling, tobacco, and other categories where the chargeback rates are statistically much higher. They will service those sites, but you might have higher fees to compensate for the higher chargeback rates that come with those categories

Source https://stripe.com/ie/resources/more/high-risk-merchant-acco...

Kickstarter should allow ACH transfer and checks for such projects. @#$% the man.

Similar parallels to trying to force dns provides to police piracy

Monero fixes this.

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws."

I dont have much respect for pornmongers but Payment Processors ganging up like this restraint of trade. It might even add up to racketeering. It's not the business of one business to render moral judgements on a customer. That's just anti-capitalist.

If only there was a group of individuals, who understood computers, communications ecosystems and payments and create some sort of protocol to make this a non-issue.

As a person who has been working in payment processing for the past 5 years, I can definitely say: a total norm. I'm impressed they allowed that in the first place.

The adult category is a very touchy one. When one get's an OK to connect to the credit card network he has to go a very arduous procedure of being approved by a CC provider. Because the worst thing that can happen from a viewpoint of a payment provider is a return. At the exact moment when someone asks for a return on a credit card, the provider is the one who is responsible and has to revert the transaction instantly.

(That's why Banks are sooooo lengthy and pushy about you filing those claims. They don't want you to initiate the return.)

Now, if you sell weed, do gambling, sell crypto, do porn or anything else of that sort, you have to pay extra for your card processing, to offset all potential problems for the payment provider.

Problems? What problems? Well, a LOT of transactions for adult content and toys happen on stolen cards. And those cards are not stolen per say. It's just a kid taking parent's CC card, or your SO is using it without your knowledge. Once found, this results in a lot of scandals and quarreling. Followed by a return request. And those returns are very annoying to that. The service "technically" was delivered. But now you are loosing it. And the payments provider does not want to be hit by that.

In fact, this is not a news in the first place. When Kickstarter sign their agreement with the card provider, they specifically stated categories of services they will be responsible for. And I guess porn was not one of them. So what? Now the provider saw a chargeback because of the adult content and did the most standard thing: Went back to the documents, noted the fact that Kickstarter not suppose to be doing adult content, and went back to Kickstarter to tell them to stop.

I handle 2-3 of such cases per month. It's called routine.

But now, enter the world of entertainment. A quick search shows one that Kotaku is a subsidiary of a larger conglamerate G/O Media (Gizmodo - Onion). A private equity company that bought out a bunch of entertainment websites like Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Kotaku. It started in 2019, and went basically bankrupt by 2023. They have been selling their websites to different holdings. In 2025 Kotaku was sold to a Swiss conclamerate that put it into a line of similar useless media resources. And if you check the author - you'll find out that he is a well-established gaming reporter. With little knowledge of the money business.

And then this article makes it to HN.

Good old democracy

You shall not receive money in "easy" ways.

I despise crypto and its shills, but damn if this is not some excellent use case for cryptocurrency.

Circumventing payment processors bending the knee to puritanical pressure is why God must have created bitcoin.

Check out Monero. I also think that the vast majority of cryptos are a scam, but Monero has a really good usecase.

This thread has some good talk about it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841149)

I think it's real BS how two organizations control international payments.

Such bullshit. Puritans are ruining everything.

I feel like if you’re going to write an article like this, you should at least engage with why it’s happening. Maybe deep down for some of the participants it’s a kind of moral thing, but mostly this is because payments for NSFW/porn stuff are dramatically more expensive. All of the “stuff” payment processors are doing is harder for NSFW/porn content, so that’s the main reason the processors want these companies to separate/cutoff that type of content.

EDIT: I’m kind of sensitive to getting downvotes on a comment. Do the downvoters think this is a high quality article giving a good amount of context for the upstream policy choices? Do the downvoters take me for supporting some kind of decision like this? Do you think I’m just wrong on my understanding of why these policies are made? I’d really encourage you to look into it. Google or chat something like “why do payment processors ban adult content”.

If it was more expensive to process, why wouldn't they pass those costs on?

The increased costs are from the increased rate of chargebacks.

Chargebacks don't cost a payment network anything.

They keep the payment fee, and they charge you a large chargeback fee. They don't lose or spend any money out of their own pocket on it.

If you have high fraud rates, they charge you a higher per payment fee.

Our company is both a payment network and a merchant, depending on specific product lines and such. We spend a lot of time preventing credit card fraud on our merchant lines of business, and very little on our payment line of business, because chargebacks cost us nothing there.

As designed.

I can't believe people keep perpetuating this lie, that they very obviously haven't thought critically about. It's so frustrating. It's like everyone just repeating gormlessly that the sky is actually purple when they can just look at it.

This is no longer as common as it used to be, and besides chargebacks (plus fees) get passed to the merchant.

How is it more expensive?

Because it cost more to check that my CC wasn't stolen when I buy NSFW?

Or because there are more chargeback?

Chargebacks. "Oh, honey, I don't know how that got there. A hacker must've stolen my card! I'll call the bank immediately!" Worked in the adult industry and traditional e-commerce. It's a perennial problem.

> Chargebacks. "Oh, honey, I don't know how that got there. A hacker must've stolen my card! I'll call the bank immediately!" Worked in the adult industry and traditional e-commerce. It's a perennial problem.

As explained elsewhere, this is a problem for the merchants, not for the platforms. The platforms don't lose money on this, and may in fact profit off of it.

I managed an adult platform with 200 employees and $75 million in revenue and a dedicated Risk Analysis team. I think I know a thing or two about this, but thanks for the input.

Good. The less smut on the internet, the better. It’s a net negative to society.

Simple idea for a simple mind: quit going to porn sites.

See how that works? If you dont like a behavior, dont do the behavior.

Dont you tell US what you want us to do.

This is called freedom.

I don’t go there. And I advocate others do the same.

100% agree. The porn industry's harms to society cannot be overstated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com