Slashdot Mirror
VISA Pulls Plug On ePassporte, Porn Webmasters
tsu doh nimh writes "Credit card giant VISA International has suspended its business with ePassporte, an Internet payment system widely used to pay adult Webmasters and a raft of other affiliate programs. A number of adult Webmaster forums are up in arms over the move because many of their funds are now stranded. Visa has been silent on the issue so far, but KrebsOnSecurity.com points to an e-mail from ePassporte founder Christopher Mallick saying the unexpected move by Visa wouldn't strand customers indefinitely. Mallick co-directed Middle Men, a Paramount film released in August that tells the story of his experience building one of the world's first porn site payment processing firms, as well as the Russian mobsters, porn stars and FBI agents he ran into along the way. Interestingly, the speculation so far is that Visa cut ties with ePassporte due to new anti-money laundering restrictions in the Credit Card Act of 2009, which affects prepaid cards and other payment card instruments that can be reloaded with funds at places other than financial institutions."
now a lot of americans( that aren't lawyers) that cant act or sing are gonna be unemployed
This movie, I've to watch.
Won't someone please think of the poor pornographers?
You make a movie that publicly flaunts that you were/are involved with mobsters (whether real or fictional), then wonder why legitimate businesses start backing away?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I thought my Visa card was over its limit.
Thanks the porn gods for Mastercard.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Is there anything easier to find for free online?
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
nothing to see here except visa losing out on a lot of business because they let the government dictate how they do legal business in the name of stopping potential crime.
shame on you visa. you are pathetic.
This kind of thing happens all the time for companies handling payment processing for adult sites. IIRC Chargeback rates tend to be pretty bad, and made worse by actual billing scams on the seedier sites; so while they're lucrative customers for the banks, they're also prone to falling foul of regulatory limits and having their merchant accounts suspended. The movie tie-in is probably the only reason this is considered newsworthy.
It's safe to say this isn't the first time porn webmasters have seen a plug pulled.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein
So if I'm an adult, and I'm a webmaster, how does this affect me? Stop abusing this word.
I'm drinking without drinking alcohol.
I'm gaming without gambling.
My adult media content is not adolescent gratuitousness, but challenging and informative content that requires some life experience to appreciate.
My adult language is educated and domain terminology that children might not understand yet.
And not in the rear.
While I haven't played online poker for money in several years, I know that I had to switch to ePassporte at one point because Neteller was longer supported in the US.
For some reason, I highly doubt that this move by Visa was solely because of Porn. And now I'm seeing from Poker Stars that ePassporte is no longer an option, I have no idea when this happened.
Shame, too, as I have a lot of tuition to pay for and was thinking about getting back into it to help pay for all the money I would otherwise have to create via alchemy. (And yes, I have a job, work 30-50 hours a week, pay rent, and all that other good stuff).
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
It's the source of a lot of click fraud, clickjacking attacks, spam, doorway page websites, etc.
I blame it on Amazon, who first pushed this as a way for ordinary people to "monetize their web site" back in the early 90s.
... paying to have your plug pulled was against the law.
Have gnu, will travel.
We had a customer recently who we sold credit card software to. We sell this software to many varying businesses. They are a legitimate business, they just happen to distribute adult DVDs. However, they lied on their form on their merchant bank, and the bank found out and cut them off, and they were unable process cards. After this dramatic happenstance, they then turn around and shopped around for a new merchant bank, but could not, because of the very reason they lied in the first place... because they were worried that if they told the truth no one would take them on.
Now it wasn't right to lie, but they didn't lie in order to launder money, they lied because they would not be taken as a serious business otherwise, and I don't know about you but I think they have that right to be taken seriously. They were let go because banks are adverse to taking a risk on any type of business like this simply in name only. Sure, there are plenty of criminal organizations dealing in porn, but there are plenty of legitimate ones too. Human beings, especially Americans, overreact to porn and sex and try to marginalize it as something demonic. When you marginalize it, you get a group of people who are willing to work with it with varying levels of morals outside of the normal. Mostly you get two kinds of people, those who think porn is perfectly acceptable, and those who think anything including criminal activity is acceptable as long as it makes money. Then less than moral companies sprout up to help the immoral and moral alike deal with this kind of business, you get moral groups popping up saying "See! porn is bad! look at all the criminal activity it breeds!" and you continue the vicious cycle.
So because banks are scared of the adult industry in general because we marginalize it, and by marginalizing it we make it prone to criminal behavior and banks don't want to take the chance, legitimate or not, so we end up with bullshit like this, businesses that are guilty by association and nothing else.
Morality... meh.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
These new 'money-laundering' rules are going to impact merchants and processors significantly. Visa is probably happy to be rid of a business with massive fraud, payment issues, and scams on every corner.
Next up will be gambling sites, mostly the poker sites which in general should be burnt off the Web for the faurds they commit, not to mention the money-laundering potential. Imagine watching user A play like a fool and lose $100k to user B, knowing all along this is the equivalent of wiring the money to user B and suffering the house's rake as cost of shuffling the funds. This is an international problem, and the only thing that stops this from happening more is that 'legitimate' poker sites do everything to keep you from actually receiving your winnings. A poker site built to facilitate laundering wouldn't bother with that nonsense, but it would discourage players other than the intended 'clientele' from playing big-stakes games (probably by using a buy-in or premium membership to keep the riffraff out) and thereby preventing unexpected players from receiving funds expected to just be 'won' by the laundering destination.
Amazingly creative these people are. The 'legitimate' poker sites rake enough, and of course are mostly pure scams, with bots hammering on live players and some people making money a few bucks at a time. The fraud and disputes are rampant, and most processors want nothing to do with this business, so they have holdbacks and huge discount rates and fees if they bother at all. Being offshore makes matters worse, and users in the U.S. for instance will have no help from anybody collecting their winnings, so they often dispute their membership fees and such, with the predictable result that the site essentially survives by scamming its users while the users are scamming each other. There is no good in online poker. None.
This is one of the darker corners of the Web. These 'money-laundering' rules will impact these businesses a lot.
And, of course, these rules will also aid in collecting taxes. The IRS is in the midst of implementing rules to use credit card processors to provide payment data which is matched to the merchants' tax reporting. If something is wrong, the IRS has the power to garnish the intended credit card payments and deliver them to the business only if they agree that the taxes were collected and all is well. And if there is a problem with the merchant's records, and the processor has some typo or error in the merchant's files, they have to send the money to the IRS and the merchant may^H^H^Hwill wait for an entire quarter to get their money back, less anything the IRS decides to withold. I say 'money-laundering' because a lot of the motivation here by the government is to get more data and get into the payment streams.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Yet another reason to not pay for any porn, ever. There is so much free stuff, and going on the hunt for hi-res pics of your favorite model is such a great hobby! (sob)
The underground economy of cam models will be hard hit.
Some of those models (the best ones) might earn a couple grand per month.
Mind you some of those models are in the good old USA... as well as ALL over the world.
The pressure will be huge to come up with an alternative payment method that is not as expensive as Western Union or bank transfers. /so I heard from a friend of a friend...
They create the definitions for those words when they are used as "terms" in a contract.
It sucks, they re-define words for a certain premise that does more to aid prosecution or default a
party to maintain the dispute rather than anything helpful.
All of it is admiralty in commerce clauses when you restrictively endorse their wrath against the people.
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
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
It is PERFECTLY possible to set up an alternative to Visa and Mastercard. The only reason no-one has managed yet is because the cost of a new hardware rollout would be prohibitive - if you were silly enough to try and replicate a model which is 15 years old and no longer needed (so you don't, basically). Visa/Mastercard don't care about fraud losses because they have you paying for it in transaction fees.
However, you need a sponsor who can cough up approx $75M or so to set up the first business. In 3 years that will have enough users to richly repay that investor many times over- because users want it (I actually have quite a few retailers who would immediately join as clients). If $75M looks a lot, Visa & Mastercard turn something like 4..6 TRILLION dollars a year. If you don't hit a billion turnover in year 3 you've been asleep..
Insert