[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.