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You’ve probably already seen the headlines around the world on this one:
We’ve got into a situation where two US credit card companies control the vast majority of retail transactions. This has been causing the adult industry a nightmare for a few years now and it keeps getting worse. They keep increasing fees (adult sites routinely have to pay 4 or 5 times as much for processing as non-adult businesses) and recently began charging huge annual fees on top. Restrictions on permitted content keep getting tighter and stricter and this is only heading in one direction.
This problem isn’t going away and businesses based in a country famous for prudishness are going to keep squeezing until anything deemed unsuitable will die. They have no significant competition and will soon have the power to “outlaw” products that are quite legal in your country. Once cash disappears (and the UK Government meets slightly less resistance each time they push that way) we will be entirely reliant on Mastercard and the other one (which I am contractually obliged to NOT mention!). Think about that…
I can’t believe I’m already in a situation where I am not permitted to say the name of a company which is a household name. Makes it hard to talk about them! I’m sure that’s why OnlyFans said “banking partners” and did not name names.
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Ridiculous and I’ve already seen a message from OF where they are trying to partially row back on the first announcement and shifting blame onto the credit card companies. With the money tied up in ALL types of porn from the very mild to the hardcore, it won’t be that much of a stretch for the industry to come up with its own funding methods and freeze out the old-style banking and credit card hierarchy (who in any case display staggering hypocrisy when you look at how much money they shift at the behest of the arms industry, organisations whose green credentials are non-existant and various ‘dark’ funding streams).
Gary likes this
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They’ve tried that before. Several companies set up payment systems but the two CC companies attacked them relentlessly and have, on at least one occasion I’ve heard of, threatened to remove card processing facilities from the bank that was providing the connection to the financial transaction system.
Weapons are not an ethical problem for the CC companies as they are US corporations, but they’ve always made anything adult-related jump through hoops. For a long while, I think the money involved made them shy away from stopping the business completely, but as they’ve slowly made the hoops higher and smaller (and added more hoops), the industry has been slowly strangled. I know LOTS of sites that have gone out of business because of processing problems, especially being dropped without warning. It’s happened to me three times that I can remember, but I just about stayed in business each time. It’s not fun to wake up one morning with a message from your transaction provider saying they’ve closed your account because the CC company has changed their T&Cs without warning.
Also, I believe there’s a long term plan to all of this. By allowing internet porn to thrive, it pretty much killed magazines and physical video sales – a lot of physical businesses died. They were hard to attack because they were sold in mainstream businesses like WH Smiths.
Now it’s all on the Internet, they can go after individual businesses without collateral damage. They can use the “moral high ground” to justify it. How many high profile adult industry sites have we seen get picked off in the past couple of years?
I know sites that have tried to use Paypal (like me actually) or even gone back to direct money transfers, although those look dodgy.
All I’ll say is, don’t expect this to get better in the long term. They’ve been doing this for upwards of a decade and now they are openly shooting down high profile businesses.
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Looks like I’m not the only one aware of this growing problem. There’s finally some mainstream news coverage that mentions it:
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