
FetLife Announcement - dohqu8Zi
http://pastebin.com/FFSQUML9
======
Tharkun
The problem with major Credit Card companies is that they're all American and
that the US of A is incredibly moralistic. For the sake of convenience, I'm
considering PayPal to be part of the same club of moralistic knobs.

It's virtually impossible to set up any kind of online shop without accepting
one or more of PayPal, MasterCard, Visa or AmEx. As soon as you accept money
for anything one of these FOUR(!) financial behemoths objects to, you're out
of luck. You'll be forced to stop using them, and as soon as you do you'll see
your revenue drop dramatically.

And why? All because a couple of old men in suits think that they know what's
"acceptable". Nevermind the legalities. PayPal makes it impossible to sell
pornography, which is perfectly legal in large parts of the civilized world.

~~~
sp332
It's not just moralistic. Porn sites have crazy high fraud rates that make
them very unpalatable from a business perspective.

~~~
fweespeech
If that logic was the case, they'd simply have a fraud metric that if you
exceeded you'd have your account disabled.

As someone who works at a company where we literally have thieves testing
cards on our site on a daily basis, any site that accepts credit cards has a
high rate of frauds as thieves test cards. Somehow, we manage not to pass
these cards to credit card processors (and no, I don't mean we use Stripe. I
mean we have our own in-house anti-fraud process since we deal with the
processors through a merchant account at a major bank like FL does). Porn
companies have filtering in place as well for the same reason.

It would be a solid metric instead of "morality" if the cause was what you
believe it to be.

~~~
saurik
Do you have a large percentage of people who legitimately buy stuff from your
website later claim they didn't? This is not your standard fraud model: with
porn you see a remarkably large amount of "oh shit, someone (usually my
significant other with whom I share my finances) just saw this charge on my
card, which is totally not OK for whatever reason, so I guess my best strategy
here is to totally disavow the charge and pretend it was credit card fraud".

A second issue porn has which most websites do not is related: customers
actively do not want their statement to accurately state from whom they
purchased the product, lest someone sees exactly what their fetish is simply
from reading the credit card report. This drastically increases the chargeback
rate from people who legitimately do not remember what they bought and do not
recognize the charge (particularly if the service uses subscriptions).

If you want to accept payments for porn, you need a fundamentally different
fraud model than for a standard website, no matter how weirdly digital or in
high demand: this is not about scammers or about black card fraud, this is
about basic lies and deceipt. I see no real reason to claim PayPal _must_ go
out of their way to support this.

A company which has is CCBill. They sign you up as a "high risk" Visa card
merchant (which is an upstream notion supported by Visa), and then are much
more hands on in the checkout process than a normal credit card processor,
with a website people can use to look up and manage their subscriptions to
websites (so like, imagine if all Stripe purchases required you to use their
web form, showing up on the customer statement as only "Stripe", and if the
customer could then go directly to stripe.com, enter their credit card
details, see they had a subscription with you, and cancel it; to be explicit:
PayPal does not have these restrictions, even though they might seem similar
to you).

(To note: it _does_ bother me somewhat that PayPal doesn't go out of their way
to support some of this stuff, but as long as the actual credit card
processing firms support it and there exist banks willing to allow it, I don't
get pissed off about it as it is totally possible for you to do it yourself...
it isn't like you are locked out of the actual network effect of credit cards,
which is what is important; and given that there even exist easy well-
supported full solutions out there like CCBill, it barely seems like a
problem.)

~~~
fweespeech
> A company which has is CCBill. They sign you up as a "high risk" Visa card
> merchant (which is an upstream notion supported by Visa), and then are much
> more hands on in the checkout process than a normal credit card processor,
> with a website people can use to look up their subscriptions to websites (so
> like, imagine if all Stripe purchases required you to use their web form and
> then showed up on the customer statement as only "Stripe", and if the
> customer could then go directly to stripe.com, enter their credit card
> details, see they had a subscription with you, and cancel it; to be
> explicit: PayPal does not have these restrictions, even though they might
> seem similar to you).

> (To note: it does bother me somewhat that PayPal doesn't go out of their way
> to support some of this stuff, but as long as the actual credit card
> processing firms support it and there exist banks willing to allow it, I
> don't get pissed off about it as it is totally possible for you to do it
> yourself... it isn't like you are locked out of the actual network effect of
> credit cards, which is what is important; and given that there even exist
> easy well-supported full solutions out there like CCBill, it barely seems
> like a problem.)

[http://pandorablake.com/blog/2013/05/censored-by-
ccbill/](http://pandorablake.com/blog/2013/05/censored-by-ccbill/)

> CCBill noted, "It is a violation of CCBill's AUP to reference 'force' in
> this context as it implies a non-consensual situation (fantasy or non-
> fantasy). In order to be compliant with CCBill's AUP, please ensure all
> references to forced acts are removed."

[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-secret-censorship-of-
on...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-secret-censorship-of-online-porn)

> The posting or display of any image or wording depicting or related to
> extreme violence, incest, snuff, scat or the elimination of any bodily waste
> on another person, mutilation, or rape anywhere on the site in a sexual or
> erotic manner, including the URL and meta tags.

 __The censorship guidelines they are applying are literally those of CCBill
as per their terms of service: __

[https://www.ccbill.com/cs/client/policies/ccbill/acceptable_...](https://www.ccbill.com/cs/client/policies/ccbill/acceptable_use.html)

You can read that there. Its in section 3.

\---

> Do you have a large percentage of people who legitimately buy stuff from
> your website later claim they didn't?

Do you not understand that chargeback rates are a calculable, actionable
metric? Or was my reference to the fact I thought worked in comparable
businesses not an obvious enough hint that I've worked for both physical goods
and ummm digital products of an intimate nature?

There is no real legitimate reason for their behavior not being modeled
entirely on actionable metrics visible to both parties. Worse, they know and
anyone who has dealt with the credit card processing on the merchant end knows
it. Its purely, at this point, little more than a political issue being
wielded where laws are unpopular.

> This is not your standard fraud model: with porn you see a remarkably large
> amount of "oh shit, someone (usually my significant other with whom I share
> my finances) just saw this charge on my card, which is totally not OK for
> whatever reason, so I guess my best strategy here is to totally disavow the
> charge and pretend it was credit card fraud".

You think people don't do this shit with lingerie, sex toys, and anything else
along those lines that might indicate an affair. K.

Every other non-credit-card-company pulls the products I've worked with based
on return/chargeback metrics that discriminate this problem with perfect ease
and shove the full cost on to me. So do credit card companies by the way for
anything that don't deem "immoral" in case you were wondering.

The metrics exist, they simply _do not_ use them for this purpose when they
target things in this manner.

\---

> A second issue porn has which most websites do not is related: customers
> actively do not want their statement to accurately state from whom they
> purchased the product, lest someone sees exactly what their fetish is simply
> from reading the credit card report. This drastically increases the
> chargeback rate from people who legitimately do not remember what they
> bought (particularly if the service uses subscriptions).

Yeah. that isn't just a porn thing. Its anything potentially sexual, including
lingerie. Please let me know when the credit card companies start banning
places like Victoria Secret. The difference here is lingerie is too
"mainstream" for that to be a viable target. And if you think companies like
Amazon doesn't pull lingerie for high rates of returns, claims of "defects",
and/or chargebacks, you've never tried to sell the stuff. This stuff has an
operational cost but for purely digital goods (porn) its quite a bit cheaper
as well.

[http://www.bedroomjoys.com/discreet-billing-
shipping/](http://www.bedroomjoys.com/discreet-billing-shipping/)

> For your privacy and protection when you place your order with
> BedroomJoys.com your credit card will be charged by Ryhma LLC and your order
> will be displayed on your credit card statement as Ryhma LLC.

[https://www.girlielingerie.com/help-faq](https://www.girlielingerie.com/help-
faq)

> We do not include our name on packaging and/or shipping labels, discreet
> plain package displaying only “GL” and no reference to lingerie anywhere.
> Discreet billing displaying only “GL” and no reference to lingerie anywhere.

\---

> If you want to accept payments for porn, you need a fundamentally different
> fraud model than for a standard website, no matter how weirdly digital or in
> high demand: this is not about scammers or about black card fraud, this is
> about basic lies and deceipt. I see no real reason to claim PayPal must go
> out of their way to support this.

I'm talking about merchant accounts with a real bank and/or dealing directly
with credit card companies. The banks aren't the ones that place pressure on
these people. Its Visa and Mastercard and so forth. Fetlife wasn't operating
through Paypal but through something like you suggest and has used CCBill in
the past and the consent/non-consent definition is part of how CCBill
operates.

\---

------
zakk
Two or three big players in the credit card market can effectively shutdown a
business.

Honest question: do we need better enforcement for the First Amendment rights
in the current digital era? Shop owners cannot decide who enters in their
shop, should digital service providers be allowed to discriminate?

The same happens when someone is banned from Facebook and Twitter: of course
there are other options, but he won't be able to reach 95% of the Internet
audience.

Edit: maybe should've spoken about a "different, active enforcement" rather
than "better enforcement".

~~~
LordKano
_Two or three big players in the credit card market can effectively shutdown a
business._

Which is just the tip of the iceberg as to why the idea of a cashless society
is so terrifying.

 _Shop owners cannot decide who enters in their shop, should digital service
providers be allowed to discriminate?_

Oddly enough, if you belong to a group or political faction that is highly
reviled, they certainly can.

Remember when a Wal-Mart refused to provide a birthday cake for a child whose
name was "Adolph Hitler Campbell"?

~~~
seanp2k2
Re: right to refuse service [http://www.legalmatch.com/law-
library/article/restaurants-ri...](http://www.legalmatch.com/law-
library/article/restaurants-right-to-refuse-service.html)

------
Shank
If there was ever a use for [insert favorite crypto currency here] gaining
adoption, the killer feature is that payments can't be halted or frozen to
accounts.

It sounds like they got hit by people who were unaware of what FetLife is
following due diligence in processing card transactions. As far as I can
discern, it's just a social network with a darker focus, which led to an
overreaction from a card network.

~~~
kefka
The the post lies this answer:

Why haven't you embraced Bitcoin to get away from the restrictions of the
banks / credit card companies? - @Eibon

Answer:

We used to accept bitcoins through Coinbase. They dropped us a year ago
because we are a kinky site. No joke.

If a Bitcoin site wants to accept credit cards, then they have to adhere to
rules set forth by the credit card companies.

Yes, there are other options, and we are going to look into them, but options
like Bitcoin are a nice to have and not currently a viable replacement for
being able to accept credit and debit cards on FetLife, no matter how much one
might want to believe otherwise.

When we offered Bitcoin as an option, it was responsible for less than 0.1% of
our daily transactions.

~~~
andreyf
Still don't see why they can't just accept bitcoin. Buying BTC via credit card
is trivial via Coinbase (and they won't ban customers), and while they won't
get 100%, they're much more likely to get quite a bit more than 0.1% even if
BTC is the only payment option.

~~~
robhu
If it is provable that Coinbase is being used as a means of bypassing VISA et
al's restrictions on sites like FetLife, what is stop VISA et al doing the
same to Coinbase?

~~~
problems
You can already proxy around the CC companies in all too many ways. Buy gift
cards, cash cards, heck, prepaid VISA cards for example.

They're not going to bother going after this kind of thing, they'd lose money
over it. It doesn't make sense from a financial perspective.

~~~
robhu
Ah. It turns out FetLife were also banned from Coinbase because Coinbase
doesn't want to be cut off as a result.

~~~
andreyf
But that's the great thing about BTC... all you need to accept them is a
computer, and all you need to know when you got some is an ISP.

------
xutopia
We need more sex positivity in this world. While I agree that some of the
contents of Fetlife was objectionable from a legal standpoint the owners did a
good job at getting rid of those things.

I think the objection today has mostly to do with the fact that they want to
tell us what we do in our bedrooms.

~~~
mschuster91
> I think the objection today has mostly to do with the fact that they want to
> tell us what we do in our bedrooms.

Yeah we already see the first signs with Trump defunding abortion
organizations. However I don't believe Trump to be behind this, much more Mike
Pence.

And I'm really, really afraid that someone will either successfully impeach,
maim or kill Trump - because then Mike Pence will succeed him, without anyone
to check his powers, given that he'll have the entire extremist religious
people in the GOP behind him.

~~~
jonlucc
I live in Indiana, and I've been living under a Pence government with a
Republican supermajority for the last 4 years. It's better than Trump. Yeah,
Pence picks ridiculous fights that cost the state a lot of money and he's a
socially regressive person who wants to impose his views on everyone, but he's
not an unhinged, unstable narcissist. He doesn't make all of his policy within
minutes of it being shown on a cable newscast. I'll be able to sleep at night
when Trump is replaced by Pence.

~~~
mschuster91
Trump isn't that unstable, I believe. He's just blindly following the call of
profit (except the pussy-grabbing and sexual assault stuff). Most of the
decisions of him and his team up to now can be classified as "will make Donald
Trump or his team money in some weird way".

And I believe that this will land him in jail or impeachment more sooner than
later.

~~~
jonlucc
Trump responds to stories from cable news by making policy on the fly. Trump
called the director of the National Parks system to tell him to produce
pictures that show more people at the inauguration. Trump sent Sean Spicer out
in front of the press to lie about the size of his inauguration crowd. None of
these make him money, and they show instability at a level that makes me
uncomfortable in the White House.

------
Analemma_
But note that it has been suggested that this is actually an internal
political purge with the payment processors and politicians as convenient red
herrings: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/23/links-117-inaugurl-
addr...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/23/links-117-inaugurl-
address/#comment-457123)

------
mcdoug
I am a member of the FetLife community as well as an HN reader. First, let me
clear up some misconceptions about FetLife that people on here may have.

It's not a porn site, or at least not primarily a porn site. The UX is a lot
closer to that of Facebook but specifically for kinky people. If you go to a
kink conference and meet someone, they will likely ask for your FL name to
connect with you (incidentally Twitter is the other popular mechanism for
communicating with fellow kinksters).

FL has a subscription model, and the main benefit you get out of that is the
ability to view other members' posted media better. There is a section of the
site called Kinky & Popular which is similar to Reddit's front page. Since
people can Love (e.g. like/heart/etc.) their friends' pictures and videos,
some become popular and land on this front page. Viewing more than the top 200
or watching the videos requires a subscription of $5/month. This section is
dominated by media of pretty, skinny, submissive women, and can be seen as
having porn-like content. Note that what ends up here is purely moderated by
the community and is not promoted by the FL staff. The people whose media ends
up here do not get paid for it.

FL until recently has had a very loose content policy. Things like blood play,
consensual non-consent, rape fantasies were all allowed. Illegal things were
not: no underage media, no snuff, etc. But people were free to discuss their
fantasies, their kinks, etc. without much restriction. Whether you agree or
disagree with stuff that gets someone off, you were free to discuss what you
want and fantasize about what you want, as long as what you are posting
violates no US laws.

FL serves an important purpose to our community: it is a place to share events
and local community knowledge, to keep up with people, and importantly to
identify abusers. This is the main benefit I see in it and it would be the
biggest loss if FL went under.

These latest developments have obviously put a damper on things at FL. They
have contacted several groups that are able to advocate for them and give
advice, and even the EFL at one point was involved. However, the outlook is
bleak. Sadly, the community is not united in supporting FL due to seemingly
arbitrary content restrictions, and FL is unable to provide a reasonable level
of service without those. If someone knows a way to help this community,
please post it here and I'll do my best to point it out to the powers that be
there. I am not affiliated with the FL staff, just a user, but they do talk to
the community freely and frequently.

~~~
hollerith
>and even the EFL at one point was involved

I think you mean the EFF (the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

~~~
mcdoug
Yes. Typo. Old thread now, but yes.

------
troncheadle
There are things that, in the interest of global freedom, need to be taken out
of the hands of corporations and government, permanently, forever. The
transfer of value is definitely one of them.

~~~
dragontamer
Erm, VISA, Mastercard, American Express, and Paypal are not US Government.
They're private companies.

Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx are doing this on behalf of their own internal
policies. Welcome to the free market.

------
rhizome
This has more front-loaded backstory than a recipe post at Pioneer Woman
Cooks, but it sounds like a harbinger for Puritan effects on commerce. Who
could be next on the list of these card companies? The cannabis world already
has their own troubles, so maybe the ratchet will next tighten on them. That a
criteria for canceling an account can be "Illegal or immoral," like those are
synonyms, is telling.

~~~
mschuster91
> The cannabis world already has their own troubles, so maybe the ratchet will
> next tighten on them

IIRC cannabis merchants can't even open bank accounts, much less accept credit
cards. The only way that they can be annoyed further is by restricting the
amount of cash they can hold in the store - which actually would make sense,
given that a pot stop filled to the brim with cash is a prime target for
gangsters.

~~~
X86BSD
You're correct. AFAIK all those pot shops in Colorado for instance are cash
based only. And have vaults built to store all their cash because the banks
won't touch it. There was an episode on Vice TV that touched on this I
believe.

~~~
goatforce5
There was an amusing tidbit in CNN's High Profits (I think it was) where the
Colorado tax department was having to put on extra security because the pot
shops were having to pay their taxes by physically handing over bags of cash.

~~~
X86BSD
Yeah! It's absolutely crazy!!

When legalization gets to my state I hope I have the foresight to have the
planning and financing in place to be the first dispensary to open here. These
things are just redonculous cash cows.

------
jakebasile
This may be naive or old fashioned, but could they take checks? Can banks
refuse to cash checks based on "morals"?

~~~
beat
Yes, but how much business would they lose?

~~~
jakebasile
I'm sure some, but if even half the people who subscribed by card sent in
checks, it's better than nothing.

~~~
msbarnett
Half would be a miracle, with that level of friction.

------
spangry
Why not Bitpay? I'm not associated with them, and have never been on the
merchant side of the transaction, but it seems like a 'safe' bitcoin option.
And based on my quick read of their merchant TOS[0] bitpay shouldn't (in
theory) have an issue with the nature of FetLife's business.

As an aside, it's fun to watch a bunch of old, technically-illiterate and
conservative financiers unknowingly sow yet another little seed of their own
destruction. I guess being at the top of the heap can make one feel
invulnerable...

[0]
[https://bitpay.com/about/terms#merchant](https://bitpay.com/about/terms#merchant)

~~~
mcdoug
They did try Coinbase before and said that it accounted for less than 0.1% of
their transaction volume. People just don't use BitCoin enough. I imagine if
it was a higher percentage, you could make the case that switching to BTC-only
would drive it higher, but at such minimal numbers, staking your entire
business on it seems like a bad risk.

------
drdeadringer
I started hearing about this several days ago via a subreddit. There had been
some confusion//discussion about what was going on regarding the group
deletions.

I'm glad to get more of the story.

------
the8472
At least in europe wire transfer via SEPA should be a viable alternative.

~~~
hackerboos
Banks in the EU would just close their accounts.

~~~
the8472
But there are a lot more choices than just 4 payment processors.

~~~
hackerboos
True but look at the Bitcoin exchanges in the UK for example. You can hop
between 12 banks and each one will close your account until none are left.

Doesn't bode well for the stability of the business.

We need a payment system which isn't Visa/Mastercard and preferably not US
based.

Honestly, China Union Pay might just say yes to the business that those
decline. If only they break into the international markets better...

