My response on the reactions caused by our AVN article on Sasha Grey

Satirical works often contain "straight" humour, usually to give relief from what might otherwise be relentless preaching. Although this has always been so, it is probably more marked in modern satire. Yet some satire is not "funny", nor is meant to be. Obviously, not all humour - even on such topics as politics, religion or art, or using the great satirical tools of irony, parody, and burlesque - is necessarily "satirical"; the most light-hearted satire always has a serious "after-taste". The Ig Nobel Prize satire on trivial scientific research describes this as "first make people laugh, and then make them think" - a fair definition of satire itself.

A quick synopsis of the events:

* We run the site xxxxx, a loyalty site for users that join adult sites, if they join via our PR link, we give them PR points then when they have enough points they can spend the points on a free 30 day membership to a site of their choice. We do this buy purchasing a 30 day membership on their behalf with our own credit card.

When we join a site on behalf of a PR member, we always use unique, random usernames and passwords.

* On 14 March 2011 we joined the site socksorority.com (a Bad Girls Bucks site), and then cancelled within the 30 day period. We used a unique username (xxxxxxxx) and unique password.

Then on 5 May 2011 an unauthorised charge was made to our credit card for $9.95 for membership to the site xmovies.com (a Movie Profits site). An email was sent and the username / password combination was exactly the same as the original join to socksorority.com. This has been recurring for a couple of months until our accountants picked this up and started to investigate further.

* When the above unauthorised transaction was detected, further investigation found another new transaction on 16 July 2011, this time for membership to wildpass.com this one for $11.32. Again this was using the same username and password combination from the 14 March transaction.

* On 30 June 2011 there was another unauthorised transaction on our card for $39.95. Whilst we never got an email I can trace for this one so I do not know the username or what site it was for, I know it is associated with mediarevenue, as the reference on the bank is PGRECINCCOM.COM which is the same processor as used for the unauthorised xmovies.com transaction.

When I initially contacted Nick / Tam about the first transaction I was told by Tam, that all was corrected and the transaction refunded. On pushing for more of an explanation as to how it could have happened, initially I had a reply from Nick,

"We recently switched to NETCASH 3rd party billing and had to switch back, when we switch billing systems we our members a discount on their membership to make up for any possible confusion..

We would never take any money fraudulently, our support agents are available 24/7 and when people want to cancel/refund their memberships we make that happen asap."

On pushing for a better response (the one above makes no sense to me), it took some chasing, then got a longer response from Tam, the shorter version of this was,

"When you signed up, maybe you didn?t uncheck the cross sales, or we had a script error that day on the processor end? This is another piece we have to research..in any case, those xsales are indeed in house and owned by us. It is not an outside entity.

Our company is quite large. And currently you are catching is in the middle of a tremendous overall. We have 40+ programs, 40+ NATS licenses, and are merging them all into 10.

This is quite the task, and involved with it is also a new 7 day hold and payout plan, moving to a 4 day...and everything involved with this. As well as moving all the processing to within those guidelines and mergers.

The processing issue did happen, we acknowledge this, and thank you for pointing it out. Hopefully you can see it was not intentional, and you can see something like this could have happened with everything going on."

With regards unchecking cross sales, (a) we always do (b) but even if we did not in error, our membership to socksorority.com ended 14 April 2011, these unauthorised transactions started in May / June / July.

There were other transactions our accounts found from 2010 that were unauthorised in a similar style (we made a paid for join using unique user/pass then a few months later an unauthorised transaction to another site using the same username/password), but these were with the old SOBV sites, and on raising these with Media Revenue, I was told they only took ownership in Jan 2011, so this needs taking up with the past owners. I cannot dispute that and did not mention these transactions further with them.

On pushing Tam / Nick for a better explanation on the charges from their sites as I still do not feel this was a good explanation, I received an email from Tam saying "this matter is closed for us, you are now verging on harassment, and its time to move on. Any more false accusations or misinformation from you, I will have sent directly to our attorneys, XXXXXX, here in Orlando."

I am posting this to the community so as you can read all this, and make your own minds up.

This industry is suffering enough with tubes sites, torrents, forums posting full site sets, and if the customer can no longer have confidence in the billing practices of sites, what hope is there for the industry to turn the tide and start growing again with confidence.

We have removed all links to any Media Revenue site from porn-rewards.com and would not promote them, or any other site / sponsor they may join with in the future.

Ann Oui is a longtime contributor to the AVN suite of editorial products, including the AVN Online and AVN magazine titles. Born in Vietnam, Ann's father, Jacques Oui, was a high ranking French delegate with international degrees in political science who married into an aristocratic Vietnamese family before being summarily executed in the waning days of France's colonial war with North Vietnamese communists. The execution was later deemed to be a mistake, however, the result of a gambling debt gone tragically wrong.