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."

Comments

Re:Well duh

[Peeteriz]

Given the money that's there to be made, the legitimate business starts backing away only when the law requires to do so (TFA, new credit card act), involvement with mafia doesn't matter as long as Visa can legally pretend not to see it.

Re:outrageous

[snookerhog]

exactly. if it weren't for them, we would have no internet

no worries...

[Kristopeit, Michael]

i was pissed when paypal did this to me in 2000... so i switched to neteller, then i was pissed when neteller did it to me in 2006, then i switched to epassporte, now i'll switch to one of the other major providers... most support the "pulse" network instead of visa or mastercard, and almost every ATM works with pulse.

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.

Re:no worries...

[Rophuine]

I was a software engineer working in a company which had a similar thing done to it by MasterCard (MC from here on). The circumstances may be similar or vastly different, but the program which triggered it was used mainly by online gambling services, and we provided customers with Maestro/Cirrus branded MCs.

The product was ostensibly a prepaid debit card for travellers. The melt-down started when an MC official at an international event received marketing material for the card, and called the help-desk. He was told all about the benefits of the card, including the ‘special’ benefits like being able to load gambling winnings onto it and then withdraw them as cash from US ATMs (I should stress that this was a program operated by our client, not by us; we were just the platform.)

It turns out that this is money-laundering. You just aren’t allowed to market that. So our client (who operated the program) was investigated, and then we (who owned the payment platform) were also investigated. While a handful of people were using the program legitimately, the vast majority were using it for its ‘special’ benefits. MC also found that we should have known about it, and we’d failed to do correct due diligence. The program was shut down immediately, and all cards were de-activated, as its primary purpose was to facilitate money-laundering (we received two hours’ warning, and I had a federal police officer standing behind me while I signed in and deactivated the card range). We lost our licence to access the MC network, and MC gave us 30 days to notify customers of legitimate programs and disconnect. We were successful in getting a court order extending this to 180 days.

MC has strict risk guidelines on this sort of thing. The integrity of the network is paramount: illegal money flows are targeted and stamped out vehemently. They would rather risk disconnecting thousands of legitimate cards than risk losing trust in a network which provides for billions of them.

The real problem is that it’s all private enterprise. Our contract with MC gave them all of these powers: if you don’t want to let MC have this sort of power over you, you don’t use their network. There is no right of appeal, especially for international partners (the court’s authority to even grant the time extension for our genuine legal programs was tenuous, and was only enforceable due to MC wanting to be nice to another party in the chain who was subject to Australian law).

I hope this is interesting information. If you want to know how the story ends, join the club: it’s still going. Perhaps you can visit David Tzvetkoff in a US prison and ask him if he knows.

I suppose what it really gets back to is that VISA is probably not doing this to comply with laws. They know that the best money for an organisation their size is to be made in massive, highly-trusted networks which are beyond reproach. They kick anyone off who might give them any kind of a smudge. Not just pr0n, obviously, I'm talking about money-laundering-style smudges. Which is not, of course, to say that this is what ePassporte was doing: there was neither trial nor opportunity to defend when MC came after us. It was "we're on our way, be ready to turn them off in front of a federal police officer when we arrive." They didn't have to prove that our client was doing anything wrong. They didn't have to prove that we should have known about it. They just decided that they were satisfied, end of story. We only got the extension from the court because they found that MC hadn't met the requirements under the contract to terminate with 30 days notice, and they had to fall back to the "we can kick you off just because we don't like the brand of office chairs you buy" 180 days.

Re:outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:outrageous

[bsDaemon]

I bet there were dirty stories and FTP servers housing content before the Web was even a fully-realized thought. Long before.

Just something to think about

[hellfire]

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.

Nope, not surprising

[rickb928]

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.

Re:Nope, not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

What a load of bullshit. Thousands of people make a lot of money online, and you can track them on sites like officialpokerrankings.com or pokertabletatings.com. There are online communities like twoplustwo.com or pocketfives.com where most of the top winners are well known in real life. High end laundering as you describe would be tracked and easily noticed by a large community that follows the "nosebleed" games. It is also (still) very easy to get winnings off, if it wasn't people would stop playing.

"Mostly pure scams"... no evidence, no citations, how on earth did this get +5 insightful.

Re:outrageous

[Lythrdskynrd]

and boobies before that...

( . )( . )

Porn Processing

[RWarrior(fobw)]

It's incredibly difficult (and expensive) to get credit card processing for an adult entertainment business, and the cartels (Visa/MC/Discover/Amex) don't want to make it easier. In my three years' work for a site dealing with just this kind of issue, here's what I found:

• 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