[Tharkun]

The problem with major Credit Card companies is that they're all American and that the US of A is incredibly moralistic. For the sake of convenience, I'm considering PayPal to be part of the same club of moralistic knobs.

It's virtually impossible to set up any kind of online shop without accepting one or more of PayPal, MasterCard, Visa or AmEx. As soon as you accept money for anything one of these FOUR(!) financial behemoths objects to, you're out of luck. You'll be forced to stop using them, and as soon as you do you'll see your revenue drop dramatically.

And why? All because a couple of old men in suits think that they know what's "acceptable". Nevermind the legalities. PayPal makes it impossible to sell pornography, which is perfectly legal in large parts of the civilized world.

[sp332]

It's not just moralistic. Porn sites have crazy high fraud rates that make them very unpalatable from a business perspective.

[fweespeech]

If that logic was the case, they'd simply have a fraud metric that if you exceeded you'd have your account disabled.

As someone who works at a company where we literally have thieves testing cards on our site on a daily basis, any site that accepts credit cards has a high rate of frauds as thieves test cards. Somehow, we manage not to pass these cards to credit card processors (and no, I don't mean we use Stripe. I mean we have our own in-house anti-fraud process since we deal with the processors through a merchant account at a major bank like FL does). Porn companies have filtering in place as well for the same reason.

It would be a solid metric instead of "morality" if the cause was what you believe it to be.

[saurik]

Do you have a large percentage of people who legitimately buy stuff from your website later claim they didn't? This is not your standard fraud model: with porn you see a remarkably large amount of "oh shit, someone (usually my significant other with whom I share my finances) just saw this charge on my card, which is totally not OK for whatever reason, so I guess my best strategy here is to totally disavow the charge and pretend it was credit card fraud".

A second issue porn has which most websites do not is related: customers actively do not want their statement to accurately state from whom they purchased the product, lest someone sees exactly what their fetish is simply from reading the credit card report. This drastically increases the chargeback rate from people who legitimately do not remember what they bought and do not recognize the charge (particularly if the service uses subscriptions).

If you want to accept payments for porn, you need a fundamentally different fraud model than for a standard website, no matter how weirdly digital or in high demand: this is not about scammers or about black card fraud, this is about basic lies and deceipt. I see no real reason to claim PayPal must go out of their way to support this.

A company which has is CCBill. They sign you up as a "high risk" Visa card merchant (which is an upstream notion supported by Visa), and then are much more hands on in the checkout process than a normal credit card processor, with a website people can use to look up and manage their subscriptions to websites (so like, imagine if all Stripe purchases required you to use their web form, showing up on the customer statement as only "Stripe", and if the customer could then go directly to stripe.com, enter their credit card details, see they had a subscription with you, and cancel it; to be explicit: PayPal does not have these restrictions, even though they might seem similar to you).

(To note: it does bother me somewhat that PayPal doesn't go out of their way to support some of this stuff, but as long as the actual credit card processing firms support it and there exist banks willing to allow it, I don't get pissed off about it as it is totally possible for you to do it yourself... it isn't like you are locked out of the actual network effect of credit cards, which is what is important; and given that there even exist easy well-supported full solutions out there like CCBill, it barely seems like a problem.)

[fweespeech]

> A company which has is CCBill. They sign you up as a "high risk" Visa card merchant (which is an upstream notion supported by Visa), and then are much more hands on in the checkout process than a normal credit card processor, with a website people can use to look up their subscriptions to websites (so like, imagine if all Stripe purchases required you to use their web form and then showed up on the customer statement as only "Stripe", and if the customer could then go directly to stripe.com, enter their credit card details, see they had a subscription with you, and cancel it; to be explicit: PayPal does not have these restrictions, even though they might seem similar to you).

> (To note: it does bother me somewhat that PayPal doesn't go out of their way to support some of this stuff, but as long as the actual credit card processing firms support it and there exist banks willing to allow it, I don't get pissed off about it as it is totally possible for you to do it yourself... it isn't like you are locked out of the actual network effect of credit cards, which is what is important; and given that there even exist easy well-supported full solutions out there like CCBill, it barely seems like a problem.)

http://pandorablake.com/blog/2013/05/censored-by-ccbill/

> CCBill noted, "It is a violation of CCBill's AUP to reference 'force' in this context as it implies a non-consensual situation (fantasy or non-fantasy). In order to be compliant with CCBill's AUP, please ensure all references to forced acts are removed."

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-secret-censorship-of-on...

> The posting or display of any image or wording depicting or related to extreme violence, incest, snuff, scat or the elimination of any bodily waste on another person, mutilation, or rape anywhere on the site in a sexual or erotic manner, including the URL and meta tags.

The censorship guidelines they are applying are literally those of CCBill as per their terms of service:

https://www.ccbill.com/cs/client/policies/ccbill/acceptable_...

You can read that there. Its in section 3.

---

> Do you have a large percentage of people who legitimately buy stuff from your website later claim they didn't?

Do you not understand that chargeback rates are a calculable, actionable metric? Or was my reference to the fact I thought worked in comparable businesses not an obvious enough hint that I've worked for both physical goods and ummm digital products of an intimate nature?

There is no real legitimate reason for their behavior not being modeled entirely on actionable metrics visible to both parties. Worse, they know and anyone who has dealt with the credit card processing on the merchant end knows it. Its purely, at this point, little more than a political issue being wielded where laws are unpopular.

> This is not your standard fraud model: with porn you see a remarkably large amount of "oh shit, someone (usually my significant other with whom I share my finances) just saw this charge on my card, which is totally not OK for whatever reason, so I guess my best strategy here is to totally disavow the charge and pretend it was credit card fraud".

You think people don't do this shit with lingerie, sex toys, and anything else along those lines that might indicate an affair. K.

Every other non-credit-card-company pulls the products I've worked with based on return/chargeback metrics that discriminate this problem with perfect ease and shove the full cost on to me. So do credit card companies by the way for anything that don't deem "immoral" in case you were wondering.

The metrics exist, they simply do not use them for this purpose when they target things in this manner.

---

> A second issue porn has which most websites do not is related: customers actively do not want their statement to accurately state from whom they purchased the product, lest someone sees exactly what their fetish is simply from reading the credit card report. This drastically increases the chargeback rate from people who legitimately do not remember what they bought (particularly if the service uses subscriptions).

Yeah. that isn't just a porn thing. Its anything potentially sexual, including lingerie. Please let me know when the credit card companies start banning places like Victoria Secret. The difference here is lingerie is too "mainstream" for that to be a viable target. And if you think companies like Amazon doesn't pull lingerie for high rates of returns, claims of "defects", and/or chargebacks, you've never tried to sell the stuff. This stuff has an operational cost but for purely digital goods (porn) its quite a bit cheaper as well.

http://www.bedroomjoys.com/discreet-billing-shipping/

> For your privacy and protection when you place your order with BedroomJoys.com your credit card will be charged by Ryhma LLC and your order will be displayed on your credit card statement as Ryhma LLC.

https://www.girlielingerie.com/help-faq

> We do not include our name on packaging and/or shipping labels, discreet plain package displaying only “GL” and no reference to lingerie anywhere. Discreet billing displaying only “GL” and no reference to lingerie anywhere.

---

> If you want to accept payments for porn, you need a fundamentally different fraud model than for a standard website, no matter how weirdly digital or in high demand: this is not about scammers or about black card fraud, this is about basic lies and deceipt. I see no real reason to claim PayPal must go out of their way to support this.

I'm talking about merchant accounts with a real bank and/or dealing directly with credit card companies. The banks aren't the ones that place pressure on these people. Its Visa and Mastercard and so forth. Fetlife wasn't operating through Paypal but through something like you suggest and has used CCBill in the past and the consent/non-consent definition is part of how CCBill operates.

---

[pzone]

Financial companies deal with far more complex risks than this every day. Making a fraud-heavy account profitable is as simple as demanding a surcharge.

Maybe some of the smaller guys don't have the resources to manage an account with the extra complexity. But EVERY company giving up a juicy profit opportunity? No way. The answer they're giving is the correct one: they simply aren't allowed to process payments from adult websites.

[tptacek]

If this was true, why aren't all the other high-fraud services that get declined simply having a surcharge demanded? Does the moralism of credit card companies extend to horoscopes, debt consolidators, tour operators, and infomercial/information products?

For this explanation to be compelling, it needs to capture the fact that porn sites aren't the only high-risk category for which vendors are routinely denied or evicted from merchant accounts. You haven't done that yet.

[prnthrowaway]

It used to be impossible to pay for porn with PayPal, however last year (I think) one of the biggest names in gay porn started accepting them as a payment method, so I guess something changed.

[hackerboos]

Segpay made a deal with them. The processing rates are still crazy high.

[joshmn]

I want to think CCBill is close by if they're not already. Just going on a hunch, though.