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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?

#291

Post by colechristensen »

Nasrudith wrote: post #281
colechristensen wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already two APIs operated by the Fed (not the treasury) Fedwire and ACH. The problem is the account. I do not want an account in the federal reserve or anywhere so closely coupled with the government. Nor do I want an account with a public ledger or any way distributed which doesn’t allow for transaction reversals (theft) which rules out blockchain. Actual banks are necessary.

The concern is pretty strange since they already have that information thanks to banking regulations. There is nothing more to lose by doing it directly.

They do not.

Banks are required to report transactions above $10k, my bank knows when I go out to buy too many gas station snacks at 2am, my government does not.

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

#292

Post by lovegoblin »

telaandrews2 wrote: post #213
lovegoblin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LOLZ I was waiting for someone to call them out. I haven't looked at their interface in decades, but last time I looked it was decades out of date. Payments is the most profitable niche in the porn industry.

I assure you it hasn't improved.

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

#293

Post by jgalt212 »

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…

> Stripe insisted it wasn't _their_ moralizing, but rather Wells Fargo (paragons of fucking virtue as they are),

very few people or orgs have principles. What they say are principles turn out to be just a blob of preferences that change with the direction of the wind.

And quite frankly, Stripe is big enough these days to push back hard against Wells Fargo, if they really wanted to. Wells Fargo definitely does not want to lose the Stripe account. As most things in life there is shared responsibility there.

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

#294

Post by game_the0ry »

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…

> To reduce the likelihood of passing that chargeback threshold and being banned, OnlyFans uses "cascading payments", which essentially load balances the payments across multiple payment processors in order to reduce their chargeback ratios across their merchant accounts

> 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.

Very smart.

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

#295

Post by dotBen »

Nasrudith wrote: post #284
dotBen wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those blinkers are called "not being utterly insane". The whole model of disruption is seeing a stupid practice saying. "No we aren't doing that stupid shit." watch practicioners of the existing stupid froth at the mouth and then either succeed or fail. Seriously that is why honor based lending died to banks centuries ago. Relationship driven is a fucking stupid way to do finance.

Finance is totally relationship driven (and 'honor systems' isn't really a good example of it). My bank waives fees on everything because of my personal friendly relationship with my banker. They gave me preferred terms of my mortgage rate because of my formal relationship - it wasn't just the product of a formula at the end of the banker's computer screen.

I know they'll do all sorts of shit for me because of the hard (account age, $$) and soft (personal) relationship.

But my point is more broad - API agreements come to mind as an example, just because that is a space I've played in prior jobs. "But the API Ts&Cs say you can't do xx but they are doing xx". Yeah, they have a relationship and got a dispensation.

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

#296

Post by colechristensen »

kilburn wrote: post #276
colechristensen wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already two APIs operated by the Fed (not the treasury) Fedwire and ACH. The problem is the account. I do not want an account in the federal reserve or anywhere so closely coupled with the government. Nor do I want an account with a public ledger or any way distributed which doesn’t allow for transaction reversals (theft) which rules out blockchain. Actual banks are necessary.

I often see US citizens being very wary of the government. Would you care to explain why is that so? In cases such as this one it strikes me as really odd: I would say that as citizens you have much more leverage over the government's actions than over whatever bank does (including handing over your data to the government). Thus, how is it better to have an account in some random bank than in the federal reserve (or…

Simple fear of authoritarian government oppression. It was also decided in the very early days of our government that a national government bank wasn't constitutional.

With Snowden's revelations of things we mostly already knew, we can see that we don't really have much leverage over government abuse of power to collect and misuse data. The government is already doing broad data collections from private companies using secret courts... it would be a whole lot worse if the government already possessed the data.

With private banks, I can choose which one I use. There is at least some motivation for that bank to be on my side, and I don't have to wait for an election cycle and hope that my issue fits in with my side on other issues and that side gets >50% after 2 or 4 years ... my bank does something I don't like and I can switch today.

I don't trust my government to do a good job doing anything, or for anything my government does to not be vulnerable to political destruction (just look at the post office).

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

#297

Post by soylentcola »

modoc wrote: post #129
saagarjha wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In the 90s many sites didn't ask for CVV, including AOL. And many gas station receipts printed the entire credit card number. And that's how some kids got online in the early-mid 90s...

I seem to remember using fake CC generators that didn't really "work" for billing but they would pass basic muster to activate the 30-day trials in their software. In retrospect this was moronic because it couldn't have been that hard to figure out where these obviously fake trials were being set up every month but somehow it worked until I was able to get a university dial-in account or a "cracked" version of those free services that showed an ad window in exchange for free dialup (the cracked versions hid the ad window).

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

#298

Post by m11a »

cj wrote: post #243
m11a wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To pull that off, they'd have to (technically) process the card info, which puts them in the scope for PCI compliance. By that point, I don't know why they'd send card info to 3 processors especially when they know, at that point, which processor they're gonna process it with. It would just make more sense to send it to the 1 processor the code ends up deciding to use.

No, I don’t think that’s accurate. With stripe.js, you send the cc info directly to stripe from the browser. Stripe returns an identifier which you can use in the future to charge the card. Assuming other payment processors work similarly, you could easily send the credit card details to multiple payment processors directly from the browser to the payment processors, and then store the card identifiers from each proc…

Stripe.js creates an iframe hosted by Stripe which sends the card information directly to Stripe. The merchant cannot see or intercept that card info, during or after transmission, and thus cannot send it to another processor (at least not using the same payment card input boxes).

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

#299

Post by cj »

m11a wrote: post #298
cj wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don’t think that’s accurate. With stripe.js, you send the cc info directly to stripe from the browser. Stripe returns an identifier which you can use in the future to charge the card. Assuming other payment processors work similarly, you could easily send the credit card details to multiple payment processors directly from the browser to the payment processors, and then store the card identifiers from each proc…

Stripe.js creates an iframe hosted by Stripe which sends the card information directly to Stripe. The merchant cannot see or intercept that card info, during or after transmission, and thus cannot send it to another processor (at least not using the same payment card input boxes).

Ah yes, Stripe.js v3 works the way you described.

I was thinking of Stripe.js v2 which doesn’t require an iframe / supports custom payment forms.

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

#300

Post by NotASithLord »

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…

Can I ask who this high-risk processor is?
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