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Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

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Re: Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

#131

Post by caruana »

moneylaundering wrote: post #65
caruana wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is the issue is not as black and white as you are making it out to be (hence, don't be an alarmist). All things are subject to interpretation and your position attempts to definitively categorize this activity as fraudulent behavior based on a 1000 word essay by a developer.

I work on money laundering cases. What the poster admitted to doing, particularly in the comments section, reads like money laundering. I have used emails more vague than this write-up against defendants in money laundering cases. The underlying crime would be bank fraud, wire fraud, or mail fraud, or all three, depending on how a particular merchant account was opened, how transactions were processed, and who the pa…

You created your account 3 hours ago, with a creative name and then annonymously post you work on money laundering cases ... As if that is supposed to add credit or show some sort of background. You are anonymous, don't try and take some high ground to reinforce an invalid argument.

Re: Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

#132

Post by vilhelm_s »

akanet wrote: post #48
caruana wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are selling content through different payment services, this is not money laundering, stop being an alarmist. "the concealment of the origins of illegally obtained money, typically by means of transfers involving foreign banks or legitimate businesses" Illegally obtained money being they key term! > literally what the feds took down Backpage for recently. Also, incorrect. Backpage was taken down because they fac…

Your mistake is in thinking that the money laundering is achieved by, say, generating a credit card charge for FOO when the item sold was BAR. Not so - the money laundering is in opening many merchant accounts purporting to be for selling FOO, generating profit sanitized as "clean," moving those profits between banks, and essentially deceiving payment processors to generate a profit. This was, in fact, one of the act…

No, this is not what Backpage was prosecuted for. If you look at the indictment in your link, the money laundering counts for Backpage were:

Counts 53-62, Concealment Money Laundering "conduct ... a financial transaction which in fact involved the proceeds of ... unlawful activity knowing that the transaction was designed ... to conceal and disguise the nature ... of the specified unlawful activity"

Counts 63-68, International Promotional Money Laundering "transported ... funds .. with the intent to promote the carrying on of ... unlawful activity"

Counts 69-93, Transactional Money Laundering "engage in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property"

The point is that all of these require an underlying unlawful activity. Prostitution is illegal, and therefore it is also criminal to handle money in a way that hides that it's related to prostitution. But selling porn is legal, so the chain payments would not violate the same laws.

Re: Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

#133

Post by FlipperBucket »

caruana wrote: post #131
moneylaundering wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on money laundering cases. What the poster admitted to doing, particularly in the comments section, reads like money laundering. I have used emails more vague than this write-up against defendants in money laundering cases. The underlying crime would be bank fraud, wire fraud, or mail fraud, or all three, depending on how a particular merchant account was opened, how transactions were processed, and who the pa…

You created your account 3 hours ago, with a creative name and then annonymously post you work on money laundering cases ... As if that is supposed to add credit or show some sort of background. You are anonymous, don't try and take some high ground to reinforce an invalid argument.

> reinforce an invalid argument.

It's not about some logical argument. That's for a judge to decide.

Re: Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

#134

Post by joecot »

kennydude wrote: post #39
philip1209 wrote: post #25

Some questions: - Would ACH solve an issue like this? There are some clean interfaces (e.g. Plaid), and chargebacks are not trivial. - Would 3-D secure solve the chargeback problem? As I understand it, it shifts liability to the consumer, not the business. - Is blockchain being adopted anywhere for micropayments like this?

> Would ACH solve an issue like this? Still doesn't solve the problem of people with shared accounts and then one half pays for porn without telling the other. It happens so often UK banks have ways of looking up subscriptions. People would reverse the transaction, still enjoy porn and the company goes out of business. > Would 3-D secure solve the chargeback problem? As far as I know, that's a European only thing? It…

3-D Secure is not a european only thing. If someone successfully signs up with 3-D Secure, the onus is on the issuing card's bank, not the merchant, so that would be ideal.

The problem we ran into was that since the 3-D Secure verification (which is a page you redirect the surfer to, or an iframe or similar) is handled by the credit card issuing bank, each page is different, and since no one actually uses 3-D Secure, when we tried to implement it, it mostly didn't work.

Reducing chargebacks is great, but if you lose 30% of your sales by redirecting them to broken pages, it defeats the purpose.

Re: Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

#135

Post by FlipperBucket »

kkop wrote: post #55
robinduckett wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't need to be ashamed of working for kink.com, or any adult site in that matter, especially in this day and age. My fiance was upset at this news, to this day she is sad about it: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jan/25/porn-bdsm-ki... (I'm not really into it, but I fully believe in to each their own!)

I wouldn't necessarily hold it against anyone working in porn so much as working in the porn industry. The porn industry is violently against even basic things like condom use (and the list continues). Such resistance tends to mean justifying things with excuses. Since compromising would be to admit to responsibility. So why should I trust that someone working in such an environment isn't going to treat private data,…

> The porn industry is violently against even basic things like condom use

THAT is a matter of profitability, whatever else you may think. SMH I have to wonder what's wrong with people who think there's some other motives.

Re: Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

#136

Post by joecot »

LarryL wrote: post #17

The title of the article is misleading, it's not programming that is the real issue, it's billing (the progamming issues are just a part in the article). Since the Credit Card companies & banks create lots of problems as soon as sex is involved (see FetLife's misadventures in HN previous articles for instance) in addition to the big chargebacks issue, and given that customers lie a lot (because they can), I think tha…

The problem is that most consumers don't plan ahead for wanting to buy a porn subscription. It's a spur of the moment decision. Any form of barrier you put in front of that decision -- whether it's extra verification, or a different digital currency they need to buy, or a prepaid card just for adult content -- drastically reduces the percentage of surfers that go from "guy looking at the site's preview page" to "guy that became a member."

This is why few Adult companies have setup Verified by Visa or 3-D Secure (though as I noted elsewhere, 3-D Secure rarely actually works) for verifying cards before charging the transaction. This is why Adult companies in the UK started scrambling when they passed legislation requiring driver's license verification. This is why no prepaid adult content card -- and there have been numerous, including one promoted by Howard Stern -- has ever really caught on. Any extra step required to pay for a site increases the percentage of people that just click off to somewhere else. Luring those people to your site in the first place is expensive, involving all sorts of advertising and affiliate deals, so anything that reduces the conversion ratio is a deal breaker.

Re: Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

#137

Post by anonymous5133 »

oliwarner wrote: post #69

We're what's broken. Our prudish approach to adult entertainment. "Joe" would have a happier life if he and his wife were open about how much money they were each spending on porn. They might learn something about each other. Hiding it in layers of shell billing companies isn't just ridiculous at the technical level described here, it's unhealthy . Also needs to be noted that —as others have said— card processing com…

There is always cryptocurrencies for stuff like this.

Re: Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

#138

Post by tomjen3 »

dangom wrote: post #20
LarryL wrote: post #17

The title of the article is misleading, it's not programming that is the real issue, it's billing (the progamming issues are just a part in the article). Since the Credit Card companies & banks create lots of problems as soon as sex is involved (see FetLife's misadventures in HN previous articles for instance) in addition to the big chargebacks issue, and given that customers lie a lot (because they can), I think tha…

That's really a nice idea. One of the possible issues here is that some of these cards, specially anonymous ones, may take time to validate. Users may not want to wait 24hrs+ for their digital content to arrive. This should be a solvable problem, though.

WHy would it take that long? If anything a new currency system would work _outside_ the broken international money transfer system.

Re: Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

#139

Post by tomjen3 »

greyman wrote: post #28
LarryL wrote: post #17

The title of the article is misleading, it's not programming that is the real issue, it's billing (the progamming issues are just a part in the article). Since the Credit Card companies & banks create lots of problems as soon as sex is involved (see FetLife's misadventures in HN previous articles for instance) in addition to the big chargebacks issue, and given that customers lie a lot (because they can), I think tha…

> Of course, to REALLY solve the problem you'd "only" need people to stop seeing sex (and porn) as bad, dirty, taboo, etc. But this won't happen anytime soon :-((( It won't, since it is not universally true, that seeing porn is not bad. There are thousands of personal accounts, or even a whole communities of people, who are trying to get rid of porn watching due to damage it brought to their lives.

Those communities seem like a way to get around the feeling of guilt associated with sex through a Christian inspired cultural lens, not based on any actual harm.

There are cultures out there where men were nothing more than a stick around their penis. I would personally not be comfortable with that, but presumably the people born in those cultures are.

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