Slashdot Mirror

• You pretty much can't get processing in your own business name if you're up-front about what you do, in the United States.
• You can't get processing in Europe, either, unless you're actually in the EU. Opening a shell corporation won't help, and even then, it's also impossible.
• You might be able to get "high risk" processing outside of the United States, out of somewhere like Vietnam or the Philippines. If you do, you can expect games with your money.
• You can expect to have your bank hold on to your funds a minimum of three months. This is not something like a 5% rolling reserve. It is, instead, a 100% rolling reserve.
• You can expect your contract to say that when you end your contract (even at the end of term in the normal course of business), your processor can hold onto 100% of your money for an additional year, starting as soon as you give your required six months notice.
• You can expect your contract to say that you surrender your domain name to your processor in perpetuity.
• You can expect to pay as much as 25% of revenue for this "service."
• You can expect to find it impossible to open even a normal checking account into which to deposit your funds, because no bank in the universe will want to deal with you, simply because you run an adult business.
• About the only semi-reputable (caveat emptor) business that will do billing for adult websites is CCBill. You can expect to pay CCBill at LEAST 10% of your revenue, and if you want to take Visa, you have to pony up another $750 non-refundable startup fee, and a $500 annual fee, on top. Approximately 40% of adult transactions are Visa, so not accepting Visa isn't a viable option for most businesses.
• CCB's software absolutely sucks. It is bloated, slow, doesn't give good control over affiliates and their production, and doesn't produce usable reports. And, I have never once given an email address to CCBill (yes, I use unique addresses for such transactions) that didn't get sold to a spammer. This includes addresses I gave to them in a business relationship, not just buying a website subscription.
• Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode, which are supposed to eliminate chargebacks, are not available to adult entertainment sites. No explanation has ever been given about why this is so, but if you run porn, you can't use these "enhanced security" services.
• CCBill supports only subscription-based services. They don't support physical good sales. Want to sell DVDs, t-shirts, photographic prints, USB keychains, or other goods along with your site subscriptions? Too bad.
• No well-known payment service aside from CCBill allows porn. This includes PayPal, Google Checkout, Moneybookers, and the rest. Want to sell legal second-hand DVDs on eBay? Good luck figuring out how to get paid. I have a warehouse full of stuff I basically can't sell because I can't get paid.

One of the reasons problems are so rampant in credit card processing in adult entertainment is that the cartels have made it nearly impossible to get legitimate processing, and so businesses that want to take credit cards have to resort to quasi-legal tactics to be able to run them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the things I looked into was the possibility of creating, essentially, a pornographer's bank. The bank would adhere to customary American banking law, but would explicitly accept legal adult entertainment business. The question we co

• You pretty much can't get processing in your own business name if you're up-front about what you do, in the United States.
• You can't get processing in Europe, either, unless you're actually in the EU. Opening a shell corporation won't help, and even then, it's also impossible.
• You might be able to get "high risk" processing outside of the United States, out of somewhere like Vietnam or the Philippines. If you do, you can expect games with your money.
• You can expect to have your bank hold on to your funds a minimum of three months. This is not something like a 5% rolling reserve. It is, instead, a 100% rolling reserve.
• You can expect your contract to say that when you end your contract (even at the end of term in the normal course of business), your processor can hold onto 100% of your money for an additional year, starting as soon as you give your required six months notice.
• You can expect your contract to say that you surrender your domain name to your processor in perpetuity.
• You can expect to pay as much as 25% of revenue for this "service."
• You can expect to find it impossible to open even a normal checking account into which to deposit your funds, because no bank in the universe will want to deal with you, simply because you run an adult business.
• About the only semi-reputable (caveat emptor) business that will do billing for adult websites is CCBill. You can expect to pay CCBill at LEAST 10% of your revenue, and if you want to take Visa, you have to pony up another $750 non-refundable startup fee, and a $500 annual fee, on top. Approximately 40% of adult transactions are Visa, so not accepting Visa isn't a viable option for most businesses.
• CCB's software absolutely sucks. It is bloated, slow, doesn't give good control over affiliates and their production, and doesn't produce usable reports. And, I have never once given an email address to CCBill (yes, I use unique addresses for such transactions) that didn't get sold to a spammer. This includes addresses I gave to them in a business relationship, not just buying a website subscription.
• Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode, which are supposed to eliminate chargebacks, are not available to adult entertainment sites. No explanation has ever been given about why this is so, but if you run porn, you can't use these "enhanced security" services.
• CCBill supports only subscription-based services. They don't support physical good sales. Want to sell DVDs, t-shirts, photographic prints, USB keychains, or other goods along with your site subscriptions? Too bad.
• No well-known payment service aside from CCBill allows porn. This includes PayPal, Google Checkout, Moneybookers, and the rest. Want to sell legal second-hand DVDs on eBay? Good luck figuring out how to get paid. I have a warehouse full of stuff I basically can't sell because I can't get paid.

One of the reasons problems are so rampant in credit card processing in adult entertainment is that the cartels have made it nearly impossible to get legitimate processing, and so businesses that want to take credit cards have to resort to quasi-legal tactics to be able to run them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the things I looked into was the possibility of creating, essentially, a pornographer's bank. The bank would adhere to customary American banking law, but would explicitly accept legal adult entertainment business. The question we co

• You pretty much can't get processing in your own business name if you're up-front about what you do, in the United States.
• You can't get processing in Europe, either, unless you're actually in the EU. Opening a shell corporation won't help, and even then, it's also impossible.
• You might be able to get "high risk" processing outside of the United States, out of somewhere like Vietnam or the Philippines. If you do, you can expect games with your money.
• You can expect to have your bank hold on to your funds a minimum of three months. This is not something like a 5% rolling reserve. It is, instead, a 100% rolling reserve.
• You can expect your contract to say that when you end your contract (even at the end of term in the normal course of business), your processor can hold onto 100% of your money for an additional year, starting as soon as you give your required six months notice.
• You can expect your contract to say that you surrender your domain name to your processor in perpetuity.
• You can expect to pay as much as 25% of revenue for this "service."
• You can expect to find it impossible to open even a normal checking account into which to deposit your funds, because no bank in the universe will want to deal with you, simply because you run an adult business.
• About the only semi-reputable (caveat emptor) business that will do billing for adult websites is CCBill. You can expect to pay CCBill at LEAST 10% of your revenue, and if you want to take Visa, you have to pony up another $750 non-refundable startup fee, and a $500 annual fee, on top. Approximately 40% of adult transactions are Visa, so not accepting Visa isn't a viable option for most businesses.
• CCB's software absolutely sucks. It is bloated, slow, doesn't give good control over affiliates and their production, and doesn't produce usable reports. And, I have never once given an email address to CCBill (yes, I use unique addresses for such transactions) that didn't get sold to a spammer. This includes addresses I gave to them in a business relationship, not just buying a website subscription.
• Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode, which are supposed to eliminate chargebacks, are not available to adult entertainment sites. No explanation has ever been given about why this is so, but if you run porn, you can't use these "enhanced security" services.
• CCBill supports only subscription-based services. They don't support physical good sales. Want to sell DVDs, t-shirts, photographic prints, USB keychains, or other goods along with your site subscriptions? Too bad.
• No well-known payment service aside from CCBill allows porn. This includes PayPal, Google Checkout, Moneybookers, and the rest. Want to sell legal second-hand DVDs on eBay? Good luck figuring out how to get paid. I have a warehouse full of stuff I basically can't sell because I can't get paid.

One of the reasons problems are so rampant in credit card processing in adult entertainment is that the cartels have made it nearly impossible to get legitimate processing, and so businesses that want to take credit cards have to resort to quasi-legal tactics to be able to run them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the things I looked into was the possibility of creating, essentially, a pornographer's bank. The bank would adhere to customary American banking law, but would explicitly accept legal adult entertainment business. The question we co

I've seen ccbill used often:

http://www.ccbill.com/

That is a defense in American statutory law, but not in practice. There are any number of outlets where anyone of any age with a sufficient amount of cash may buy a Visa gift card. I once sent an 8 year old to do it and he came back to me with a legally-purchased, fully working card I used to buy a subscription to a porn site.

Indeed, Visa specifically prohibits using a Visa card number as an age verification mechanism in their Rules for Merchants:

"The merchant must not use the account number for age verification or any purpose other than payment."

(Approximately 60% of adult industry transactions carried our by credit card on the net are carried out with Visa cards.) cite

Even if Visa permitted such a use, the merchant fees make it unworkable: Visa charges a percentage of every transaction, and the acquiring bank charges a fee as well, generally anything from a quarter to a dollar per transaction, PLUS a percentage, ranging anywhere from 2.3% to 15% of the ticket price, depending on a lot of factors they won't tell you about. This means that it simply isn't economical to use credit cards as a verification mechanism: It costs the merchant too much. To make a credit card transaction pay for itself, the merchant must make enough profit on the transaction to cover the fee, and if there's no fee, there's no profit one can use to cover the cost of the transaction, so it's a money-losing proposition.

So, right now, there is no way to effectively prove age, either adult or minor, on the internet. None.

No this is for porn. URDX does the same thing and its free

Like anything teh intarweb else the online porn world is full of a lot of crap. If you're willing to pay for good stuff, I'd recommend the hegre archives or the vulis archives. (yes, those are affiliate links :P).

As far as free stuff, a lot of it can suck. Especially if you just google "porn" or something. The good stuff is out there, you just need to know where to look. But many in this "community" (if you want to call it that) seem to think of traffic as a commodity that they can buy and sell. Most of the sites you see aren't selling porn, they're selling traffic. Namely, you. That's why you see so many pop-ups, garbage, and other crap. Not to mention tons of misleading links or whatnot. It wouldn't surprise me if the "passwords" you got were actually put out there by people trying to get you to sign up for a "real" account. That seems to be pretty common these days.

But yeah, for the most part the online porn world is festering along with the rest of the net, with spam and crap. These people are really "overgrazing the commons" They get lots of hits now, but in the end they alienate so many people who know consider online porn to be basically the same thing as spam. They may make more for themselves, but damage the industry overall.

Like anything teh intarweb else the online porn world is full of a lot of crap. If you're willing to pay for good stuff, I'd recommend the hegre archives or the vulis archives. (yes, those are affiliate links :P).

As far as free stuff, a lot of it can suck. Especially if you just google "porn" or something. The good stuff is out there, you just need to know where to look. But many in this "community" (if you want to call it that) seem to think of traffic as a commodity that they can buy and sell. Most of the sites you see aren't selling porn, they're selling traffic. Namely, you. That's why you see so many pop-ups, garbage, and other crap. Not to mention tons of misleading links or whatnot. It wouldn't surprise me if the "passwords" you got were actually put out there by people trying to get you to sign up for a "real" account. That seems to be pretty common these days.

But yeah, for the most part the online porn world is festering along with the rest of the net, with spam and crap. These people are really "overgrazing the commons" They get lots of hits now, but in the end they alienate so many people who know consider online porn to be basically the same thing as spam. They may make more for themselves, but damage the industry overall.

Getting a real merchant account isn't that hard if you're legitimate. I've done it, and I used Bank of America, not some off-brand "Internet bank". Anybody who's willing to pay 14% instead of 3% is probably doing something suspicious.

Instead of going through all the hazzle of setting our own billing system then have a look at the billing systems above. I personally wouldn't trust an unknown company/payment solution (no offence)...