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."
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.
exactly. if it weren't for them, we would have no internet
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 cute how your name is commodore64_love and you think that there was no porn on the internet until the world wide web went graphical. I must have been imagining all those a.b.p.e. groups.
I bet there were dirty stories and FTP servers housing content before the Web was even a fully-realized thought. Long before.
I bet there were dirty stories and FTP servers housing content before the Web was even a fully-realized thought. Long before.
No need to bet, I will testify. ASCII porn doesn't really count, but there were plenty of x-rated gifs (and other now mostly forgotten formats like .pic and .pcx).
Yes, back in the day we had to spend half an hour to download a single image but the waiting made it that much sweeeter.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Master(bation)Card
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
fuck that, i'm having a scotch and playing poker with nude women.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
hardly, you are probably too young to remeber ASCII graphics - http://www.google.ca/images?q=ascii+art&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1&redir_esc=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=xXCBTI-PFsufnAft2ZB_&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CDYQsAQwAw but there was porn in the text based interwebz
Please don't dominate the rap, Jack, if you got nothin' new to say.
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"
I was downloading porn from usenet newsgroups starting in 1987. Sure, there was no snazzy Windows GUI and it was all uuencoded text that I had to decode into pictures. But in 1987 that was pretty cool and exciting.
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.
You do realize that the packets used for the most basic ping test are a few bits of an image of a topless pin up model, right?
Porn joined the internet party in the form of BBS's before the internet was even the internet. I have a record of the file transfer of a single playboy playmate image from 1987. Its the first porno I have a record of on the internet(what was the internet at the time), I keep it for nostalgic purposes, plus she's hot.
There is also a very good argument to be made that the internet would have taken a lot longer to go graphical at all if it wasn't for porn.
Also, didn't someone find ascii porn on like the second Univac system ever built?
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.
I assume you mean the late 90s or early 2000s; the web was launched in 1990, but it wasn't until around 1994 that it started taking off (with very little commercialism at that time), and Amazon themselves didn't launch until '95!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
It's cute how your name is commodore64_love and you think that there was no porn on the internet until the world wide web went graphical.
Most people who grew up with 8-bit computers didn't have access to modems or online services, let alone the Internet, some weird academic thing until circa the mid-90s, which most of us had never even heard of.
That said, I do remember downloading porn from text-based bulletin boards when I first got on the net circa 1994....
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
and boobies before that...
( . )( . )
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.