141–150 of 305 posts
Somewhat related, a story that digs into who's running onlyfans.com: https://forensicnews.net/2020/08/13/onlyfans-faces-allegatio...
Why do you think the porn industry is prone to more fraud/risk?
A man orders porn and pays using his credit card. His wife looks at the statements and asks him what he’s up to. He denies having made the payment so the wife initiates a chargeback.
Even better, at least in the UK, the bank had tools to find out what the subscription was for and whose name it was in,
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…
I also find it surprising the amount of back bending people will do to say that payment processors are only doing it because the transactions are high risk. Your story, the thousands of other public stories, and the payment processors themselves have made it absolutely clear that it isn't about the transaction risk. It's them imposing their religious beliefs upon others.
With sex being such a huge part of our lives, why aren't we bending out backs to _help_ the sex industry thrive, instead of defending corrupt oligopolies?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chargeback ratio's are per account, but also have a minimum absolute threshold. So it's say, 2% chargeback AND at least 200 chargebacks before penalties kick in. In a past life I worked for a place who had a few hundred processing accounts to load balance it all out because their chargeback rates were way too high. If an account gets close, you just don't use it for a month, or you throw a bunch of "safe" recurring c…
Don't tease us like that! Sounds like a fantastic blog story.
In the process two state AG's lost their careers, multiple US senators were implicated, a bank collapsed, there was kidnapping, human trafficking and drug running, and in the end created urban legends of gold bars being buried in the mountains to hide it from being seized by the feds.
I don't know of anywhere that has it all written out, but here's a related NYT story with a fair bit of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/business/in-utah-a-local-...
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…
This is why banking is a rent-seeking and though we need the financial industry they are ghoulish vampires sucking the lifeblood out of everything they touch.
/rant
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…
My guess is Onlyfans has a very low rate of chargebacks/fraud and negotiated a special deal with Stripe. The reason that rule is there is because most adult sites are dodgy.
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…
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…
What is the threat model, exactly? What eventuality is the bank seeking to avoid?
Are there edge-case regulatory issues at play? Are there moral-consumer groups out there that run public pressure campaigns against banks that transact on adult toys that look too realistic? Is a corporate lawyer somewhere worried about photos of a realistic-looking appendage used explicitly being tied back to the bank -- but if it's painted green they can plausibly argue "hey it's definitely not real, look it's green!"?
This just feels like such a spectacularly arbitrary line that I'm fascinated by the thought process.