How WePay Failed Eden Alexander | Hacker News Reader

How WePay Failed Eden Alexander

kittystryker.com

55 pointsmakomk48 comments

This is one of the areas where bitcoin actually has value as a payment system (vs. as an investment asset or other more sophisticated things) -- industries which are suffering from gatekeepers.

If WePay could process bitcoin payments, they wouldn't be beholden to essentially the lowest common denominator of bank policies at the card associations. This would disproportionately help marginalized groups, and would be awesome.

So, rather than hating WePay, I'd rather just ask them to allow bitcoin. It's ironic that WePay started in response to PayPal (who are worse than the banks by some factor), but has now gotten to the point where they banks are preventing them from getting too much better.

Or you could just follow the rules with whatever payment processor you choose. Adult content is not a problem, you just have to pay more for it because the fraud rates are much higher than for non-adult content.

If no-adult is what you built your business model around, you're probably not going to be able to do adult rates due to 1% of your business being adult and make it work.

Surely there are ways to set up paperwork to separate " FooBar Prodictions" from "FooBarXXX Productions"

And Bitcoin is not reversible and has lower transaction fees.

To anyone that is considering using WePay, I STRONGLY urge you to select Balanced Payments instead. I personally had a $2,000+ order cancelled by WePay, even though my account was 2 years old and had done many thousands of dollars worth of previous transactions. The "stated reason" by their support team was that I included a line item for an "electronic physical item" in the invoice displayed on the checkout page, which was for consulting purposes. If you actually check their prohibited businesses/items, electronic items are not included.

Overall, WePay's support is generally horrendous. You should expect to have your orders randomly cancelled, funds frozen, and no explanation given... Unless of course you're a major figure and raise a big deal about it.

Our response: http://blog.wepay.com/post/86048891401/wepays-terms-of-servi...

Also, if anyone wants to contribute to helping Eden Alexander you can read about what she's had to go through and why she needs help here:

https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/eden-alexander-emergency...

"WePay discovered tweets from others retweeted by Eden Alexander offering adult material in exchange for donations. This is in direct violation of our terms of service"

Which part of the TOS did she violate?

...well, if you actually read the TOS that they linked to you'd see it's right there under "Prohibited Activities". As WePay says, this is mainly to comply with payment gateway rules (adult services have a far, far higher fraud risk associated with them).

https://www.wepay.com/legal/terms-of-service

Unfortunately, your snarky response is entirely devoid of anything close to an answer to my question.

I did read the TOS and I don't see how "tweets from others retweeted by Eden Alexander offering adult material in exchange for donations" "is in direct violation of our terms of service". (quotes from http://blog.wepay.com/post/86048891401/wepays-terms-of-servi... )

I think this is a missed opportunity. Terms may have been violated, okay, that warrants closing the account, do that, then donate enough money to her to help her out, and bask in the PR.

Was this screenshot doctored? http://kittystryker.com/files/2014/05/Screen-Shot-2014-05-17...

If not, why does it not point out the tweets that led to the decision?

That email was from GiveForward, not WePay.

So you "uncovered" that third parties were offering incentives to donate for her medical care but somehow a campaign that is explicitly against your TOS continues?? http://www.gofundme.com/613loo

That campaign has received $1200 in four months. I don't expect it has a very large social media presence. It's easy to believe that they could miss it. Besides that,

The violation seems to be that it's a radio show which has at one point featured: "Pastor Scott Lively joined us revealing the evils of the homosexual agenda". This violates "you will not accept payments or use the service in connection with [...] hate".

This is... I mean, I agree that this is using the service in connection with hate. But if I have a criticism of WePay here, it's not "you should be taking down that fundraiser" and it isn't "leaving that fundraiser up is inconsistent with taking down Eden's". It's more like "hate is a ridiculously vague thing to disallow in your TOS".

> Upon reviewing payments starting May 15, 2014 WePay discovered tweets from others retweeted by Eden Alexander offering adult material in exchange for donations.

So essentially, she repeated something someone else said, is that about it?

People were selling / donating porn to raise money through WePay, and Eden encouraged it.

She was advocating people break the terms of service for WePay (who themselves have terms of service with their vendors).

It does not appear the porn was going to be produced as a result of the donation. Either way the funds shouldn't have been held.

I think the bigger question is - WTF is up with the Doctor? I have never heard of this. I always thought they remained neutral regardless of beliefs?

Feel free to check out Eden's twitter and take some time to appreciate how your approach has affected her (ie she's now in hospital), then consider changing the way you deal with issues like this.

Why would WePay risk being in breach of their own contracts because a small customer has a sad story? They are required to put a stop to transactions that don't meet the rules, even if it's sad. Internet poker to raise money for chemo would similarly be off limits despite its noble goal.

WePay has the same terms as PayPal, Stripe, etc. It's not out of some moral choice on their parts, it's because all of the major banks in the US deem adult content as risky and forbid it.

PayPal and Dwolla seem OK with the content as long as it is not deemed illegal (we do know that Paypal deems illegal whatever it is told though) http://www.bannedwriters.com/payment-service-policies/

ToS are are proven by courts right...

PayPal flip flops on porn. Back in the day they use to be quite friendly.

this is ridiculous.

1) this wasn't about porn, it was about a seriously ill woman who needed help

2) she retweeted some stuff from third parties who weren't part of her campaign, probably out of ignorance, not realizing it might be a problem

3) wepay didn't do the sensible thing and just talk to her and let her know she might be breaking the ToS, they closed down her campaign, her situation escalated and now she's in ER

4) It's amazing that people just say banks deem adult content as risky, and just accept that this is ok. It only just recently broke that banks are actively closing down porn actors bank accounts just because of their profession.

It's sad what happened to Eden. But it would also be sad if WePay got in trouble with their back-end processor, because they'd have to pass on that cost to all their other clients.

This is a shitty situation, but that doesn't mean any of the parties involved are malicious or evil.

> wepay didn't do the sensible thing and just talk to her and let her know she might be breaking the ToS

I agree that they probably should have done this.

> 4) It's amazing that people just say banks deem adult content as risky, and just accept that this is ok.

That's because it is risky. No question. Adult services have a higher rate of charge-backs and fraudulently obtained cards than many other sectors.

Statistics?

Eh, this is the lowest form of argument. Whatever merits this whole thing may or may not have, she's in hospital because of amongst other things, a massive staph infection, not because WePay removed her campaign.

Your TOS does not mention the word "adult". What was the problem and how do other adult entertainers avoid the problem.

This is also an opportunity to take a stand and invite other payment processors to accept funds from legal adult activities, AMD thetebynwin your business.

This is first and foremost a failure of the United States and its dysfunctional health care system. WePay made it worse, but she shouldn'tve had to collect donations to pay for essential medical care in the first place!

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That troll would have to be the person who is running the campaign... She was publicizing it herself.

Related material: Cindy Gallop's struggle to get ANYTHING for MakeLoveNotPorn.com - which has a fantastic, social mission. She can't even get a bank. We've been working our banking partners to see if we can find a fit, but no takers.

Here's a really great talk on it if you're interested: http://www.swiss-miss.com/2014/05/cindy-gallop-make-love-not...

So... Who is the "stripe/wepay/paypal" of the adult payments industry?

ccbill

your neighbourhood drug dealer / pimp.

Is there a legal reason for being so conservative about financing porn? Or is this purely a moral stance that WePay is taking.

It's traditionally a very high fraud industry (tons of stolen credit cards, charge backs, etc). There are high-risk processors that specialize in it, but with higher fees than your typical processor. WePay's agreements with who they send payments through require that the transactions meet a certain standard and to get the rates that they get one of those standards is no adult content.

But why did the owner simply retweeting other tweets makes it higher risk?

For WePay it's not about risk, it's about being compliant with the rules laid down by the bank they use. The banks don't want to be involved with payment processors who process adult-related transactions, and if companies like WePay don't play ball with the banks rules then the banks walk away and WePay has to close.

There are probably situations where a company like WePay has to take the stance of better safe than sorry and not piss off the bank, because if the bank gets pissed and walks then bye-bye WePay.

So when WePay sees the owner retweets the tweets encouraging violating the TOS, they can't risk losing their relationship with the bank that processes their payments. On the one hand they might alienate some customers or put someone in an unfortunate situation, on the other hand their business collapses because they can no longer process any payments. Shutting down some accounts like this one is sad, but for payment processors it's their only real choice.

Why was WePay monitoring the owner's twitter account at all?

Perfectly put.

> "This is in direct violation of our terms of service as our back-end processor does not permit it."

That's from WePay's blog post. Though from the OP it seems there are other campaigns that should also fall foul of the ToS but continue regardless.

Due to the high fraud rates, the chargeback rate on adult content is generally 1%, compared to 10% for other merchants. It's very, very easy to lose your merchant account because of that restriction. Blame VISA.

Do you have those numbers backwards?

I meant the cutoff point for the processor - 1% for adult content compared to 10% for everyone else.

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