Is this a case of culture clash or me being oblivious, where an actual decent amount of people would think less of Visa for allowing transactions to go through with this? Because to me they just handle money. Never occurred to me they would take a stand against any kind of transaction that is not, you know, illegal or outright murder-for-hire.
I never understood it either but I’ve always heard any x-rated business has difficulty finding and keeping payment processors. I did hear one person say the “protect our brand” line is only an excuse and the real reason is that x-rated businesses typically have way more chargebacks than normal businesses (due to post nut clarity) and payment processors end up dropping them for that reason.
Yeah. High chargebacks and fraud (both actual fraud and fraudulent fraud reports) on adult content. I think a lot of it has to do with the “spouse factor.”
Payment processors tried the same for pornhub and only fans FWIR. These are relatively new institutions run by dinosaurs who probably don’t even understand the service they provide and just rake in billions from transaction fees.
Visa’s decision will be Discover and PayPal’s win.
I worked in payday loans, another sector Visa won’t do business with…except when we built our own Level 1 payment gateway as a holding company, and then Visa was fine with it. Even knowing who owned us.
Similarly, when Visa pulled this shit in the 90s, the porn industry formed CCBill and eventually Visa came crawling back through them as the payment gateway to take the heat. The moment plausible deniability can be established, they’ll be back.
I was actually paying for my hentai games for a while too…
