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…
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.
FetLife Announcement
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Re: FetLife Announcement
#72* FetLife flopped PCI. It accepted credit cards itself. It still accepts ACH payments itself. Those behind it could not be bothered to take security seriously.
Re: FetLife Announcement
#73At least in europe wire transfer via SEPA should be a viable alternative.
Re: FetLife Announcement
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but how much business would they lose?
All international users, at the very least. Edit: FetLife is based in Canada. Are checks a thing there? (honest question from a European who has never even seen a check)
Re: FetLife Announcement
#75We need more sex positivity in this world. While I agree that some of the contents of Fetlife was objectionable from a legal standpoint the owners did a good job at getting rid of those things. I think the objection today has mostly to do with the fact that they want to tell us what we do in our bedrooms.
I have more faith in the greed of bank CEO's than to believe this is anything other than risk avoidance.
This is part of a broad effort to moralize what we are allowed to buy and sell online.
Re: FetLife Announcement
#76The 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…
It's not just moralistic. Porn sites have crazy high fraud rates that make them very unpalatable from a business perspective.
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.
Re: FetLife Announcement
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have more faith in the greed of bank CEO's than to believe this is anything other than risk avoidance.
It really isn't. Fraud risk is something that can be actuarially managed by setting appropriate fees and surcharges on at-risk sites. It would be a huge profit opportunity if they were allowed to take it. This is part of a broad effort to moralize what we are allowed to buy and sell online.
It is probably a legal risk from laws that hold them liable for certain merchant behaviours.
Re: FetLife Announcement
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. These boundaries have nothing to do with the first amendment.
You didn't get my point. I'll try to make it clearer. Nowadays the right to free speech is enforced in a passive way, so-to-say: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech". However the Constitution was written in a different era, when doing nothing to abridge the freedom of speech was effectively granting freedom of speech to everyone. Today on the Internet a few corporations can effectively a…
Note that I am not taking any position on whether such a new right would be a good or bad idea. I am merely pointing out that what you envision is in no way within the scope of the existing First Amendement.
Re: FetLife Announcement
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just moralistic. Porn sites have crazy high fraud rates that make them very unpalatable from a business perspective.
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 m…
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.)
Re: FetLife Announcement
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
All international users, at the very least. Edit: FetLife is based in Canada. Are checks a thing there? (honest question from a European who has never even seen a check)
Cheques are very much still a thing in Canada. Especially for private rentals.