Credit Card companies get out of PORN Business
 

This may be an interesting article which was located at:

http://www.storyhunters.com/skintalk...es/000985.html

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June 16, 2004
No More Charging Porn
If you want to pay for porn on the Web, forget PayPal. PayPal quit helping adult websites take their customers' money last year. And you can also forget CardService International, who is pulling out (ha ha) at the end of June. Web-porn retailers are worried that Visa will follow, as American Express stopped in 2000.

According to a Wired article, CardService International said, "We don't believe there is enough benefit from this type of business for our shareholders and employees in the long run." Which is odd, when you think about the pretty penny AOL, Time-Warner, and hotel chains make from porn each year. Porn sells- it's a fact. Which leaves one to wonder about the real reason for the credit-card pullout.

With the amount of cash the porn industry rakes in, this can only mean one thing: entrepreneurs of a morally flexible nature will be in a tearing hurry to fill the gap left when the big boys of credit-card service leave the playing field. It seems highly unlikely that the Web porn industry will shrivel up overnight. As long as the Paris Hilton sex tape sells 200,000 copies on pre-order alone, I am not worried about the smut stopping.

Note: the best part of the Wired article? This quote: Ironically, it seems that the customers, not the site owners, have become the leaders when it comes to ripping people off. Porn sites must fight an eternal battle against subscribers who engage in "friendly fraud" by spawning "chargebacks," Boyer said. They pay to look at dirty pictures or video and then run to their credit card company claiming they never authorized the charges. (The practice is also known as the "gak factor" because of the word husbands utter when their wives ask about their credit card bills.)

Posted by lsaintcrow at June 16, 2004 11:54 AM | TrackBack

Comments
Cardservice is pulling out of the adult biz because they don't want to answer to their stockholders. Just as PayPal was bought by Ebay (a public company) did the same thing. The adult biz was GREAT for cardservice, it was probably one of the reasons why they were able to take their company public.
Need help with an adult merchant account, I'm limited, but you can check out the limits on our site

Posted by: Joe Montella at June 16, 2004 03:29 PM
I wonder how much it has to do with the Bush administration. Consider what happend with the movie Farenheit 9/11, with the producing company fearing it would lose tax breaks from the aministration. The major card companies may very well be getting kickbacks for helping Bush with his "fight against obscenity
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Uri

interesting points

It will never happen, Visa will always be there...they're a very greedy entity, nobody would turn their backs on a billion+ a year.

Yeah - Visa needs money too!

It's frightenning to consider that possibility. And it is possible.

i think it will happen, hope no time soon!

I thought adult only represents a fraction of Visa revenue, so if the heats too much to take, maybe they will pull the plug?

Do you know the kind of uproar that'd happen if all the cc companies pulled out? It'd open the door to organized crime cc companies to pour in especially left-wing companies to pick up the slack. The right wing would panic. It'd be the worst decision as it would allow liberal financialists to gain a foothold to astronomical proportions.

It ain't gonna happen. The banks are run by conservatives. If liberals got the bulk of porn sales they would dump it all on their politicians and radio and press ( don't give me that 'liberal press' bullshit, it's all owned by conservatives ).

Push come to shove, foreign powers backed by federal okays would take up the slack and your surfer's privacy would be kaput.