by mrguyorama | 2025-11-06 16:56:10+00:00
Our business is one of the most straightforward ways to turn a stolen credit card into usable money for a fraudster. I know what our fraud rates are. At no point has any payment processor cared at all about a payment flow with high fraud. At most, they will charge us a tiny bit more money to service those transactions.

Credit Card companies do not care about chargebacks, as long as you don't substantially hurt consumer goodwill. They get their money back from the merchant, and every successful chargeback is a reminder to consumers of how credit cards will protect you. A false chargeback would also be unlikely to harm consumer confidence in that protection, since the consumer knows they weren't defrauded.

We know Ashley Madison had millions of paying subscribers. The idea that porn websites have "Higher fraud rates" entirely comes from the unstated assumption that porn consumers will chargeback their payment, and this claim is not justified. Consumers do not make a habit of making false chargeback claims, it just isn't substantiated in the data. We also have substantial evidence that lots of people want to genuinely pay for porn, and will pay significant amounts.

If 1 out of every 5 people who paid for pornhub tried to do a chargeback, that would not be a payment stream the credit card processor would be bothered by.

Meanwhile, the facts on the ground are that there is a fundamentalist religious organization formerly known as Media Matters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl... who have been working since at least the Nixon administration to ban things like sex toys from sale, to ban sex education, to stop same sex marriage legalization, to prevent the decriminalization of sex work. They were part of LBJ's commission on obscenity and pornography. They asked Reagan to ban pornography in 1983. They are significantly responsible for the large media blitz in 2020 that demonstrated that pornhub had a genuine problem with things like revenge porn and underage porn that lead to pornhub deleting 90% of their content, which frankly is a good thing, but they are demonstrably and openly not out to help sex workers or keep porn safe, but rather to kill it. Their official stance is that porn is a public health crisis. They were one of the principle supporters behind FOSTA, a bill that most sex workers insisted would make their jobs less safe.

Why is there a popular, trite, completely unsubstantiated narrative that is super popular on places like reddit for how porn companies lost the ability to take payments despite open and direct and admitted actions by an organization that has openly worked for decades to ban porn who helped sue porn companies? Gee, I wonder why.

Meanwhile, two months ago, the stepson of the chairman of that very organization was charged for child porn, so you know, the standard religious right style of "We have to protect the children" while literally abusing children.

Notably, the recent spat with getting some really, uh, """Niche""" adult oriented games off steam was not (at least, publicly, but this is not an accusation) done by them, but an unaffiliated Australian organization that has a better track record of doing what they claim. Steam also is still selling lots of porn games.