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Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

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Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you find out what payment processor(s) a given site uses? I'm a developer so looking at what kind of request the application is doing when interacting with anything involving payments. In the case of OnlyFans it was easy as they make direct requests to Stripe. In other cases, I've looked at the data structures stored in the current page by using the JS console and compare it to the API docs of various paymen…

I'm not a web developer but I always assumed that happened on the backend, so it wouldn't be visible. I guess not?

The contents of the request should hopefully be encrypted, but you can easily see where the request is going.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It spreads the chargebacks across multiple processors, who don't talk to each other so don't know about the chargebacks on the other processors.

That still does not affect the ratio

The individual processors are the ones who care about chargebacks, not VISA itself. So by spreading the processing among several of them, the number of chargebacks per processor are lower.

It's load balancing.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#83
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the government will close your bank accounts if they discover you are making money off pornography. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa8xy9/is-the-doj-forcing...

What I don't understand is that that this isn't even illegal, so how could the government possibly argue that those accounts should be closed?

Because the government insures those accounts for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. If you want to benefit from the insurance then you can only use the account for purposes allowed by the insurance contract which excludes "high risk" activities which is defined to include essentially all sex related services.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#84
post #20

Somewhat related, a story that digs into who's running onlyfans.com: https://forensicnews.net/2020/08/13/onlyfans-faces-allegatio...

> Weeks before Radvinsky purchased the OnlyFans holding company in the United Kingdom, he received a $250,000 tax credit from the state of Illinois. “The purpose of the Angel Investment Tax Credit Program is to attract and encourage the placement of investment dollars into early-stage, innovative companies throughout Illinois.” Your tax dollars at work.

You know what a credit is?

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It spreads the chargebacks across multiple processors, who don't talk to each other so don't know about the chargebacks on the other processors.

That still does not affect the ratio

Maybe the confounding factor here is that the term "load balance" could be extremely unsuitable for onlyfans' processing logic; e.g. they might preferentially route the risky transactions to one or two processors that won't get too agitated/punitive.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still does not affect the ratio

The individual processors are the ones who care about chargebacks, not VISA itself. So by spreading the processing among several of them, the number of chargebacks per processor are lower. It's load balancing.

Also lower is the number of transactions. The ratio stays the same.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#87
Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing pretty quickly.

We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem.

Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe informs us we're going to be deplatformed because Wells Fargo (their banking partner) had reviewed our account (apparently because of its volume) and determined we violated their standards because of the nature of the toys.

We did a bit of back and forth where Stripe suggested we alter the colors available (seriously) to assuage Wells Fargo's puritanical concerns, and Stripe insisted it wasn't _their_ moralizing, but rather Wells Fargo (paragons of fucking virtue as they are), but we weren't willing to compromise on the nature of our product or have our product's options or colors dictated to us by one of the most corrupt banks on the planet.

We ended up deplatforming and moving to a high-risk processor who was willing to match our competitive Stripe rate. That processor sucks and their fraud protections are weak and their interface is garbage, but they're not telling us how to run our business.

Was mostly disappointed that we went through an arduous review process with Stripe beforehand and received assurances we'd be fine since our chargeback rate is insanely low and we ship actual physical product and have no nudity on our site, but alas.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#88
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The individual processors are the ones who care about chargebacks, not VISA itself. So by spreading the processing among several of them, the number of chargebacks per processor are lower. It's load balancing.

Also lower is the number of transactions. The ratio stays the same.

From my experience in the adult industry, the processor cared more about the total than the percentage.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they not ask for a CVV or any other verification?

We did something surprisingly similar once as stupid kids/teens and it was in the days before CVV. Just touch tone to enter a card number (although we did this little experiment from a payphone using a 1-800 (toll free) sex line). Typically, you entered a card number after some initial "pitch". AFAIK, 1-900 numbers only worked by billing you on your phone bill.

Haha I guess if your credit card failed they just billed the line. His brother most likely got blamed for it.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#90

Why do you think the porn industry is prone to more fraud/risk?

The porn industry has been known in the past to have some very shady people working within it. They would use the porn as a front for other illicit activity. The have used porn to launder money from those other activities. Credit card fraud is a huge part of that. If you are into stolen credit cards while owning a porn site, you just subscribe to expensive recurring plans. It's not really hard to understand why it's…

Why didn't they use non-porn for such activities and money launder? What is the substantial difference between porn and any other expensive subscription? E.g. you build a garage, name it notaws (or whatever service was expensive back then) and launder an ocean of fraud through it. Why must somebody get banged in the process?
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