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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?

#101

Post by lovegoblin »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #17
breakingcups wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon did crack down on some extreme content, stating they were forced to do so by their payment provider(s).

Weird they wouldn't switch providers for specific use cases. Does Stripe require to be exclusive provider for site?

There are very few payment processors that will accept adult content, and those that do exist (e.g., CCBill) are both expensive - on the order of 10x the fees - and also a damn nightmare to work with.

I can very easily imagine a scenario where Patreon looked at their options and decided it wasn't worth it.

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

#102

Post by tejasmanohar »

Many of the rules aren't rules. We ran a travel company and used Stripe in the past, which is also one of the disallowed industries. We got approval from Stripe after proving that we have a negligible fraud & chargeback rate due to being focused on business users

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

#103

Post by marcus_holmes »

preinheimer wrote: post #77
gruez wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They publish an 886 page "public" version which is actually kind of an interesting read: yet a search for "adult" only yield one result, and it's in the context of a card for minors.

and as with all things, interpretation is key.

As pointed out, the banks also have a say. And banks are notoriously risk-averse and prudish. It's much easier for them to say "no" than "yes".

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

#104

Post by lovegoblin »

disillusioned wrote: post #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 in…

Unfortunately exactly 0% of this story surprises me.

> That processor sucks and their fraud protections are weak and their interface is garbage

I have three guesses and they're all CCBill.

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

#105

Post by Quarrel »

nasalgoat wrote: post #82
vehementi wrote: post #80

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.

This just isn't true. Yes, you can be pinged by the processor, but mostly because they're worried about the CC networks pinging them.

Source: Have a 30M+ people site that has been pinged by VISA itself for chargeback ratios ...

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

#106

Post by realmod »

adrianmonk wrote: post #96
justinholmes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most websites can't/shouldn't store the card number, they embed Stripe JavaScript that sends card number to Stripe and get a token id to use on the backend later on. Can't store CCV or number without passing PCI compliance.

Interesting. Do they literally embed Stripe JS? I'm not a front end developer and don't know a ton about web security, but it seems like a malicious/hacked site could still get the card number this way. The purpose of PCI compliance is to protect the number/info, so how would Stripe (and similar) get approved if they're creating a payment widget that allows third parties to snoop card numbers? Is this a PCI loophole,…

Stripe JS uses an iframe for card number which blocks the site from accessing the number. And the only way to access the card number is either a security hole in the iframe message handling or in the browser.

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

#107

Post by DebtDeflation »

disillusioned wrote: post #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 in…

>where Stripe suggested we alter the colors available

What? Like flesh colored was ok but definitely not green ones or something?

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

#108

Post by lovegoblin »

pen2l wrote: post #95
sk5t wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is any given transaction distinguished as being risky or non-risky?

Just off the top of my head, they'd have chargeback rate per-performer and per-customer. Or they may have some kind of internal scoring system that rates how "porn-y" a given performer is - maybe that correlates to chargeback rate.

Who knows - I'm just spitballing. But there are signals one could look at.

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

#109

Post by lovegoblin »

tejasmanohar wrote: post #102

Many of the rules aren't rules. We ran a travel company and used Stripe in the past, which is also one of the disallowed industries. We got approval from Stripe after proving that we have a negligible fraud & chargeback rate due to being focused on business users

Yeah this is something I think a lot of people in this thread are missing: OnlyFans is probably big enough that they can negotiate their contract with Stripe.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #107
disillusioned wrote: post #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 in…

>where Stripe suggested we alter the colors available What? Like flesh colored was ok but definitely not green ones or something?

[deleted]
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