
How WePay Failed Eden Alexander - makomk
http://kittystryker.com/2014/05/not-waving-but-drowning-how-wepay-failed-eden-alexander/
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rdl
This is one of the areas where bitcoin actually has value as a payment system
(vs. as an investment asset or other more sophisticated things) -- industries
which are suffering from gatekeepers.

If WePay could process bitcoin payments, they wouldn't be beholden to
essentially the lowest common denominator of bank policies at the card
associations. This would disproportionately help marginalized groups, and
would be awesome.

So, rather than hating WePay, I'd rather just ask them to allow bitcoin. It's
ironic that WePay started in response to PayPal (who are worse than the banks
by some factor), but has now gotten to the point where they banks are
preventing them from getting too much better.

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jonknee
Or you could just follow the rules with whatever payment processor you choose.
Adult content is not a problem, you just have to pay more for it because the
fraud rates are much higher than for non-adult content.

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rdl
If no-adult is what you built your business model around, you're probably not
going to be able to do adult rates due to 1% of your business being adult and
make it work.

~~~
judk
Surely there are ways to set up paperwork to separate " FooBar Prodictions"
from "FooBarXXX Productions"

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ianhawes
To anyone that is considering using WePay, I STRONGLY urge you to select
Balanced Payments instead. I personally had a $2,000+ order cancelled by
WePay, even though my account was 2 years old and had done many thousands of
dollars worth of previous transactions. The "stated reason" by their support
team was that I included a line item for an "electronic physical item" in the
invoice displayed on the checkout page, which was for consulting purposes. If
you actually check their prohibited businesses/items, electronic items are not
included.

Overall, WePay's support is generally horrendous. You should expect to have
your orders randomly cancelled, funds frozen, and no explanation given...
Unless of course you're a major figure and raise a big deal about it.

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billclerico
Our response: [http://blog.wepay.com/post/86048891401/wepays-terms-of-
servi...](http://blog.wepay.com/post/86048891401/wepays-terms-of-service-as-
it-relates-to-the-adult)

~~~
nemof
Feel free to check out Eden's twitter and take some time to appreciate how
your approach has affected her (ie she's now in hospital), then consider
changing the way you deal with issues like this.

~~~
onewaystreet
WePay has the same terms as PayPal, Stripe, etc. It's not out of some moral
choice on their parts, it's because all of the major banks in the US deem
adult content as risky and forbid it.

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nemof
this is ridiculous.

1) this wasn't about porn, it was about a seriously ill woman who needed help

2) she retweeted some stuff from third parties who weren't part of her
campaign, probably out of ignorance, not realizing it might be a problem

3) wepay didn't do the sensible thing and just talk to her and let her know
she might be breaking the ToS, they closed down her campaign, her situation
escalated and now she's in ER

4) It's amazing that people just say banks deem adult content as risky, and
just accept that this is ok. It only just recently broke that banks are
actively closing down porn actors bank accounts just because of their
profession.

~~~
objclxt
> _4) It 's amazing that people just say banks deem adult content as risky,
> and just accept that this is ok._

That's because it _is_ risky. No question. Adult services have a higher rate
of charge-backs and fraudulently obtained cards than many other sectors.

~~~
krainboltgreene
Statistics?

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jimrandomh
This is first and foremost a failure of the United States and its
dysfunctional health care system. WePay made it worse, but she shouldn'tve had
to collect donations to pay for essential medical care in the first place!

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tomasien
Related material: Cindy Gallop's struggle to get ANYTHING for
MakeLoveNotPorn.com - which has a fantastic, social mission. She can't even
get a bank. We've been working our banking partners to see if we can find a
fit, but no takers.

Here's a really great talk on it if you're interested: [http://www.swiss-
miss.com/2014/05/cindy-gallop-make-love-not...](http://www.swiss-
miss.com/2014/05/cindy-gallop-make-love-not-porn.html)

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thatthatis
So... Who is the "stripe/wepay/paypal" of the adult payments industry?

~~~
us0r
ccbill

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grimtrigger
Is there a legal reason for being so conservative about financing porn? Or is
this purely a moral stance that WePay is taking.

~~~
jonknee
It's traditionally a very high fraud industry (tons of stolen credit cards,
charge backs, etc). There are high-risk processors that specialize in it, but
with higher fees than your typical processor. WePay's agreements with who they
send payments through require that the transactions meet a certain standard
and to get the rates that they get one of those standards is no adult content.

~~~
yuhong
But why did the owner simply retweeting other tweets makes it higher risk?

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istorical
For WePay it's not about risk, it's about being compliant with the rules laid
down by the bank they use. The banks don't want to be involved with payment
processors who process adult-related transactions, and if companies like WePay
don't play ball with the banks rules then the banks walk away and WePay has to
close.

There are probably situations where a company like WePay has to take the
stance of better safe than sorry and not piss off the bank, because if the
bank gets pissed and walks then bye-bye WePay.

So when WePay sees the owner retweets the tweets encouraging violating the
TOS, they can't risk losing their relationship with the bank that processes
their payments. On the one hand they might alienate some customers or put
someone in an unfortunate situation, on the other hand their business
collapses because they can no longer process any payments. Shutting down some
accounts like this one is sad, but for payment processors it's their only real
choice.

~~~
krainboltgreene
Why was WePay monitoring the owner's twitter account at all?

