I suspect it has less to do with their puritanical values and more to do with the enormous amount of fraud in the industry and the customer support load it places on them from the husbands, wives and children who swear up and down they aren't responsible for the charges found on the bill.
Affiliate products and rebilling scams solved this problem 15 years ago. You just need a high risk merchant account provider who will accept the extra risk of chargebacks, most likely in exchange for higher fees.
Surely if the risk of fraud is an issue, the processing companies could simply price it into their models and charge the vendor a premium for it.
This is exactly it. Notably betting sites accept higher fees without issue. Obviously the margins take a hit but they're still profitable.
The main difference is that a gambler will keep throwing money (and encouraged to do so via dark patterns to keep the margins), whereas post-nut clarity is the main barrier to maintain the margins in porn.
Makes me wonder how much the payment networks themselves can ultimately make the final call. Even if you find some high risk payment processor in Monaco, that won’t help much if the Amex/MasterCard/Visa cartel blacklists you.
What I don’t understand is the selective enforcement – why doesn’t this happen more often? Who is pressuring the payment networks?
The card cartel doesn't care as long as they don't lose money in the process.
In general merchants don't deal with client cards directly but through payment processors. The chargeback process is usually manual (meaning it requires non-negligible resources) plus it impacts the fees the card cartel collects (if the chargeback is accepted).
High risk payment processors generally agree to pay card cartels for the fee lost if chargebacks are accepted, and sometimes even perform refunds to stay within a threshold of chargebacks. This, plus extra fraud monitoring/protection makes their service more expensive.
You don't need a processor in Monaco, CCBill or PaymentCloud are US based and offer that. Now, they shave a significant chunk of the transaction in flat+percentage fees, it can be anywhere from 4 to 15% depending on your profile.
Even if true, the enormous amount of fraud is in large part a result of their puritanical values. The fraud happens because it's an underground industry, it's an underground industry because of the puritanical values, etc.
This is like saying "drugs are bad because of all the violence" when the violence is mostly a symptom of how we treat drugs.
Yeah, Visa and Mastercard debit cards carry the same fraud/abuse protections as a credit card. They usually don't cover all the extra crap the credit cards do (car rentals, etc) but they will absolutely give you your money back and perform chargebacks in cases of fraud or denial of services tendered.
Interesting. In Europe, with a credit card, you can effectively just say to the bank “nah I didn’t pay this” and it’s on the bank to prove otherwise (it’s harder/impossible where pin was used but in the web it’s fair game). Debit cards have protection for outright fraud (and even then somewhat limited), certainly no “umm no” simplicity.
Somewhat. You can have a charge to your account reversed, but it's not a common thing and the process isn't trivialised.
Source: almost accidentally undid an in-shop payment because their processor was based in a different town where i had never been. Realised at the last moment where the charge came from; bank was willing to undo.
