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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?

#131

Post by 0xffff2 »

voxic11 wrote: post #83
saagarjha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aren't bank accounts required to be insured? Is there any legal way to offer a "high-risk" bank account?

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

#132

Post by atarian »

disillusioned wrote: post #115
DebtDeflation wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The inverse of this. Here's their exact, hilarious wording: >Our banking partners recently notified us that they are no longer willing to support the sales of realistic sex toys. I understand that your products were designed to depict the body parts of mythological and fantastical creatures, and we have indicated this to our banking partners in an effort to advocate for continuing to support your business here on Str…

Or maybe Stripe changed their minds about having you guys as customers and made up a reason for you to leave.

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

#133

Post by ocdtrekkie »

edwinwee wrote: post #57
larrik wrote: post #48

That's a good question, since Stripe backed out at the VERY last minute for a customer of mine who sells alcohol over the internet, despite repeated assurances it would be fine.

Stripe can typically support alcohol businesses (assuming they hold the appropriate licenses). Could you get in touch at edwin@stripe.com and we can take another look?

I love the subtle indication here that someone who almost certainly knows "the" authoritative answer to this thread is reading it. Though obviously I understand why you probably aren't at liberty to answer the question.

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

#134

Post by fooey »

thinkingkong wrote: post #124
folli wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They went to prison for load balancing, or how does this relate?

Gambling.

The business was just run of the mill "get rich on google" and "free government grant" garbage that was common in the 2000's.

Ironically, they made so much money doing their regular business the owner bought a small US based bank and was running online poker processing through it.

When "black friday" in the poker world happened, the bank failed and everything fell apart, but so far as I know, no one involved was ever charged with anything related.

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

#135

Post by walrus01 »

euix wrote: post #25

How much of the internet traffic is actually pornography in general? I have heard a lot of anecdotal hearsay that it constitutes a majority.

It's not a majority, if you look at the traffic patterns for a medium sized ISP, the vast bulk of the evening peak traffic these days is what I would call "legit" non porn video. For residential singlehomed customers it's a huge amount of youtube/google AS traffic and Netflix traffic. And a lot of other stuff like people downloading 200GB Xbox one games, Steam games, etc.

To the point that a very small ISP that is singlehomed to a Cogent or HE type transit provider, can halve its monthly IP transit bill by joining an IX such as the NWAX and establishing settlement-free peering BGP sessions with just google and netflix.

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

#136

Post by adrianmonk »

gruez wrote: post #113
realmod wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really. It's true that the main site (parent of the iframe) wouldn't normally have access to the card numbers, but there's nothing preventing you from replacing the iframe entirely. There isn't an "address bar" for iframes, and people certainty aren't manually checking the address by right-clicking, so there's a very high chance you can get away with it. Even if some user checked and noticed the iframe was missin…

> There isn't an "address bar" for iframes

Maybe there should be? If it's important to know what site you're looking at in a top level page, the same thing should apply to an embedded one.

Often when I learn about web security, it seems like the user agent abdicates responsibility to be an agent for the user.

Probably a case where it's more obvious in hindsight why this is important, but it could still be retrofitted. Maybe there's a better way, but for example, a browser could make the address bar a breadcrumb widget using multiple URLs to depict the iframe nesting.

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

#137

Post by partiallypro »

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…

We had a client that is a big strip club in the area that started selling t-shirts with the name of the club...Stripe banned it just a few months after launch.

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

#138

Post by kennydude »

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…

Apparently now the rules are no adult things, or anything moderately related to adult content now,

Real pain because Stripe are one of the better providers to integrate with :(

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

#139

Post by gruez »

adrianmonk wrote: post #136
gruez wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. It's true that the main site (parent of the iframe) wouldn't normally have access to the card numbers, but there's nothing preventing you from replacing the iframe entirely. There isn't an "address bar" for iframes, and people certainty aren't manually checking the address by right-clicking, so there's a very high chance you can get away with it. Even if some user checked and noticed the iframe was missin…

> There isn't an "address bar" for iframes Maybe there should be? If it's important to know what site you're looking at in a top level page, the same thing should apply to an embedded one. Often when I learn about web security, it seems like the user agent abdicates responsibility to be an agent for the user. Probably a case where it's more obvious in hindsight why this is important, but it could still be retrofitted…

>Maybe there should be?

How do you prevent a website from faking the address bar? The only reason that you can trust address bars right now is that the website can't draw outside the content frame. There's already attacks on mobile[1] involving fake address bars because the address bar can be hidden, allowing the site to draw a fake address bar in its place. The only secure way to do it would be to opening another window (like when you try to use sign in with google), but that still has the issue that lots of legacy sites won't use this security feature, so users will still happily enter in their credit card numbers.

[1] https://jameshfisher.com/2019/04/27/the-inception-bar-a-new-...

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

#140

Post by nolok »

toxik wrote: post #119
disillusioned wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inverse of this. Here's their exact, hilarious wording: >Our banking partners recently notified us that they are no longer willing to support the sales of realistic sex toys. I understand that your products were designed to depict the body parts of mythological and fantastical creatures, and we have indicated this to our banking partners in an effort to advocate for continuing to support your business here on Str…

Wow, this is hysterical! A bank saying no to honest money because it’s sex toys, not even that, because it’s sex toys looking like human genitalia, — no not even that, because the toys are skin colored! I wonder if this would ever happen in Europe. I somehow feel that we’re more... open to these things. Do you know about Klarna?

I don't know about Europe in general, but my brick and mortar bank (one of the major banking chain in France with an agency in pretty much any city of over 5000 people) was perfectly fine with adult things being sold using one their group's online platform as long as I was ok with their elevated rates. I've seen lately that they're also responsible for payment processing on dorcel.com (the french porn group, adult content and toys).

Dalenys ( https://www.dalenys.com/ ) -> natixis belgium -> natixis -> bpce group ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_BPCE )

I've had awkward talk with them (mostly around the fact that I should not point out their parent group brand much near the adult content), but never in a million years would they tell me what color a dildo should be.

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