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The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

theguardian.com

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Re: The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

#261

Post by elliekelly »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #238
myself248 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two reasons. One is the higher incidence of chargebacks. You don't have to ask if something is naughty -- just look for the chargebacks and it'll tell you. What happens is someone charges a thing, their partner sees it on the CC statement and asks about it, the first person is ashamed to admit it so they act shocked and insist it MUST be fraud because THEY would never charge something like that, and to keep up appear…

There is one more: legal compliance. While there is no law on the books that says banks can't do business with OnlyFans, there are laws ( BSA comes to mind ) that in effect create incentives for banks to 'derisk' problematic customers. Some get branded high risk based on internal and industry standards.

This is the reason. Sex work is a crime so banks can’t offer banking services and sex work-adjacent businesses (like strip clubs) tend to be high-cash businesses so they’re considered high risk for money laundering. This means the entirety of adult entertainment gets bucketed as “high risk” even though technology has, in theory, significantly changed the actual money laundering risk presented by these businesses.

Also, the type of people who are typically sitting in the meetings who would have to sign off on changes to these long-held banking “truisisms” haven’t given it a second’s thought and they really don’t care to re-examine their beliefs anyway.

Re: The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

#262

Post by mkr-hn »

wiseStab wrote: post #203
croes wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A payment processor is useless without the possibility to pay with a credit card. And that means you depend on Visa, Mastercard and Amex.

I think we should have some sort of internet money that can be used to transact without any central authority.

So far every option has a usability problem that's been solved by companies with the same KYC requirements as credit card processors. This will remain the case as long as people also want to transact in fiat currency, and that will be true as long as it's how people pay the bills and buy food.

Any crypto-only platform that solves the problem of everyone needing a copy of the ledger and gains meaningful adoption will face the same legal, PR, and regulatory pressures as anything else in the same place.

Re: The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

#263

Post by mylons »

pessimizer wrote: post #25

The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks. The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather th…

deutsche bank literally launders money for drug dealers, terrorists, and generally a lot of other criminals. what are you talking about?

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/01/germany-orders-deutsche-bank... is just the first result from a google search

Re: The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

#264

Post by dalbasal »

laurent92 wrote: post #133
dalbasal wrote: post #22

I suspect that "accountability" is a problematic frame. Platforms are the accountability mechanism, increasingly so. As for banks... Everything new is old again. Financial institutions have long been the unofficial regulators, acting more or less in unison with arbitrary decision making power. Tech platforms have just joined the game.

But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn? of all the possible battles to lead, children and the sanity of adults would be their battlehorse? If so, I admire it.

>> But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn?

I think a secret meeting to form a secret cabal is unlikely. More like an approximate consensus, that has always existed in an industry that has always been highly centralized, in a world where sex work has always been marginalised.

My point was that there's nothing new about relatively arbitrary power at banks to decide who can do business.

It's pretty uncontroversial, if you think about past decades. Was there no profit to be made providing financial services to women, before it became normative in the 50s-70s? Theoretically, there probably was. In practice, banking norms were not to.

Re: The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

#265

Post by fragmede »

the_gipsy wrote: post #166
FranksTV wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if it's really a great market that's underserved, then you should launch a payment processor that serves the market. People think this is about morality, but it's a lot more about the cost of operating in that market. I bet that there are way more claims of fraud, money laundering investigations, subpoenas and other overhead that the banks don't want to deal with. Like teenagers stealing credit cards to pay c…

> if it's really a great market that's underserved, then you should launch a payment processor that serves the market. A credit card for porn… good luck.

Payment processor for porn, not a credit card. That is, the part you put your credit card into. Some already exist, but they charge a high premium due to increased risk, but they still only exist because the banks continue to allow them to.

Re: The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

#267

Post by adrianmonk »

rattray wrote: post #255
myself248 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two reasons. One is the higher incidence of chargebacks. You don't have to ask if something is naughty -- just look for the chargebacks and it'll tell you. What happens is someone charges a thing, their partner sees it on the CC statement and asks about it, the first person is ashamed to admit it so they act shocked and insist it MUST be fraud because THEY would never charge something like that, and to keep up appear…

My impression was that payment processors, not banks, were on the hook for chargebacks, but I may misremember?

If there's a chargeback, someone has to cough up the X dollars that the cardholder spent and return it them. That typically isn't the bank. But it also requires Y dollars of overhead to work on the issue until it's resolved.

The cardholder calls their bank (the issuing bank) on the phone, and right away the bank has spent money answering the call.

After the bank tells the merchant that a chargeback is happening, the merchant can dispute the chargeback (make their case that it was a legit purchase), which the bank has to adjudicate.

Credit card processing is a high-volume, low-margin business. The bank's cut is roughly 2-3% of the purchase. For a $10 purchase on OnlyFans, the bank is only making like 20 to 30 cents off that transaction. If a chargeback happens, the required manual work will cost them many times that. So, in order for it to be profitable, banks need chargebacks to be rare. If they're frequent, it's less profitable or even unprofitable.

Re: The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

#268

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #25

The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks. The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather th…

[deleted]

Re: The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

#269

Post by dalbasal »

pessimizer wrote: post #25

The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks. The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather th…

This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.

I don't think causation runs one way. The financial industry & "Government" aren't clearly delineated. You can see this all the time in "compliance." Banks will commonly cite "compliance," essentially blaming the regulator for various policies. If you ask the regulator itself, they'll generally consider a lot of that stuff bank policy.

The way in which banking regulation works in practice creates a ton of ambiguities like this. "Compliance" is basically the area between regulation and internal policy. One firm will adopt a policy, which has all sorts of compliance implications. Another will copy them. The regulator grows to expect it, and it develops from there.

Market centralisation encourages this a lot.

Re: The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

#270

Post by tqi »

saddlerustle wrote: post #132

This article completely misses the causes of the rule changes. Banks and payment processes pushed new rules because they were being held accountable. The changes were all implemented in response to hugely influential NYT opinion piece on PornHub in December [1] that specifically called out payment processors, and preempted a BBC investigation into OnlyFans that was hinted to do the same [2]. The conversation here sho…

Yeah this piece seems to forget that the Guardian[1] was also very critical of Pornhub when the NYT story came out. It seems like their position is that neither a completely hands off approach or a complete ban is acceptable, and that the only moral path is to allow the good and police the bad with perfect precision and recall.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...

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