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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?

#171

Post by dotBen »

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

This, one of the biggest blinkers technically-inclined founders have is that they forget or ignore that so much is relationship driven.

Rules like Stripes (+ Wells Fargos) are not interpreted like code, everything is open to negotiation and degrees of freedom depending on the relationship established.

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

#172

Post by fpgaminer »

sandworm101 wrote: post #169
fpgaminer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would contest that if the industry wasn't demonized it wouldn't have a dark side.

Hollywood isn't daemonized, but I used to give basically the same advice. Industries that run on attractive young people, people looking at very short careers, tend towards evil. Ask any successful recording artist about their first record contracts. Taylor Swift is writing songs about that dark place.

Fair enough, I can see that. I think a good portion of the evil in those industries comes from sexism, but that's really tangential to the topic and I appreciate your point.

EDIT: I would like to expand my previous comment though. Whenever prostitution is legalized we see massive improvements in the lives of sex workers. It seems clear to me that further reducing the demonization of sex, sex workers, etc would lead to a better work place in those industries for similar reasons. There may be a baseline of evil, for the reasons you point out. I don't think that should stop us from working to at least reach that baseline, rather than just leaving the people and businesses that inhabit that crucial landscape to rot.

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

#174

Post by HenryBemis »

bb88 wrote: post #154
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…

What I'm curious about is whether or not OnlyFans has bribed off Wells Fargo -- I mean it could be in a legal way for financial services that are non existent. In other words, Stripe allows OnlyFans because Wells Fargo has been bought off on the side. Ergo, Wells Fargo doesn't complain anymore. How much would that need to be with Wells Fargo? 10 million per year? 50 million? Does OnlyFans make enough to afford 100 mi…

I read this on some legit news site a few days ago: apparently Bella Thorne, a formed Disney actress-turned-pornstar(?) joined OnlyFans and hit $1m in 24 hours.

I don't follow OnlyFans progress and I have no idea how many "content creators" they got and what is the "fanbase", but if a 20yo nobody with a nice body can take $1m in 24h (then I assume that is with 1-3-6-... months subscriptions)(so she won't bring in another $1m the next day as well). OnlyFans keeps 15-20-25%? And Stripe/WF share a 1-2%? And OnlyFans has 10-20 people of that "caliber" like Mrs Thorne? They won't complain for a long time.

I assume that the OP writing about millions, he/she means revenue, not Stripe/WF profits from the fees.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/26/entertainment/bella-thorn...

Edit: I couldn't remember the site, I DuckDuckGo-ed and this piece of news appears in many sites, I chose CNN as I didn't recognize most other "celebrity news" sites.

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

#175

Post by ardy42 »

mrdumas wrote: post #56

Since, I know a friend in this industry, let me explain what's going on here. Yes, OnlyFans uses Stripe, but that's not the entire story. In the adult/porn world, there's a high amount of chargebacks and fraud relative to low-risk industries like SaaS software. If you pass a certain chargeback threshold in the adult industry, your account is terminated, and no payment processor will do business with you. To reduce th…

> I think Stripe is there for models on the site who don't sell adult content. OnlyFans probably does a check to see if the page is adult-related and if it is, then routes it to the correct payment processor.

How would the bank even know that transactions for adult-content pages were routed away from it? Wouldn't they just all come in as "OnlyFans wants $20 from card XYZ?"

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

#176

Post by fock »

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…

so sad that wirecard went down, then you could have had a clean german fintech... oh wait.

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

#177

Post by outworlder »

sandworm101 wrote: post #159
fpgaminer wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing your experience. It absolutely disgusts me the power that payment processors have over businesses. The sooner that industry is dismantled and made agnostic the better. I remember watching some BDSM website's documentary where they talked about how their payment processor dictated the kind of content they were allowed to make. It boggles my mind that people are okay with that. I also find it surp…

>> _help_ the sex industry thrive There are dark sides. It is not the friendly industry oft portrayed. It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive. It is regulated because it needs to be. Most common complaint heard by lawyers in the field: "I did the shoot, the movie is on the website, but I haven't been paid." Followed worryingly by: "They said I had to because I had signed a contract." The advice I give…

> It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive.

Some of it maybe. But not the toy selling business being discussed.

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

#178

Post by outworlder »

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…

> 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 Stripe.

I'm crying. This is so ridiculous it crossed the line from appalling into hilarious.

You haven't sued over this which is a shame. Think of the comical email threads that would've been unearthed during the discovery process!

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

#179

Post by adrianmonk »

gruez wrote: post #139
adrianmonk wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

> How do you prevent a website from faking the address bar?

Well, my suggestion was to add additional URL(s) into the same address bar that already exists at the top. (Hence the breadcrumb widget.)

My original motivation was to not wreck the layout of pages that are currently counting on the inside of the iframe to be big enough to hold all the expected content.

But it also protects the additional URL(s) from being drawn over because you already can't draw over the address bar.

That mobile address bar hiding hack is pretty scary, though.

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

#180

Post by simias »

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…

I don't really understand the motivation behind this puritanism. I get why respectable institutions don't want to touch things like selling weed or prostitution since that's not legal everywhere and they could get in trouble. But sex toys? Who cares? Like, that's not a rhetorical question, literally "who cares?"

Are people going to stop using Wells Fargo because they very indirectly help in the commerce of sex toys?

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