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There has been a recent crackdown on naughty games on steam and itch.io. The game platforms say the crackdown has come from payment processors. Payment processors have said they don't want their business associated with unsavory practices, and that adult products have higher charge back rates. Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.
I mostly feel a sense of annoyance. My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.
The banks are not wrong on this point. The industry is rife with bad practices on the customer side - teenage boys using their dad's credit cards, dads telling mum that a teenage boy used dad's credit card, people paying (real and virtual) card thieves for stolen credit cards to protect their anonymity, people who just feel comfortable committing so-called "friendly fraud" (i.e. buying something and taking advantage of the pro-consumer bias in the chargeback process to avoid paying for it) against a pornographer in a way they wouldn't against any other website, real post-purchase regret. And it isn't immune to bad practices on the website side - particularly hard-to-cancel subscriptions. Also, from a bank perspective, the low barriers to entry attract the kind of business that will be surprised by this and go bust under a wave of chargebacks leaving their acquiring bank with a loss.
Most banks are not interested in providing payment processing to the online smut industry for sound commercial reasons - it is a specialised market niche for banks who are happy dealing with massive chargeback fraud and whose fees reflect this. I suspect the Venn diagram of "Banks Valve management are comfortable working on Steam payments with" and "Banks which want to bank smut" looks like a pair of spectacles.
I think this is all bullshit at this point. On average to make a credit card purchase I have to enter the credit card number, the CCV, open the bank app on the smartphone and enter the PIN. Depending how you count it's either 3 factor authentication or 4 factor authentication.
Once you have a system like this in place you can just say "no" to chargebacks, there is no constitutional rights to chargebacks on pornography. I don't know how things are in other countries but I strongly suspect that the "we have a lot of chargebacks" has been a fake excuse for around 20 years.
Consider as well how completely the banks and cc companies will screw over their customers in hundreds of other ways. They will cheerfully add 47 overdraft and late fees and not reverse those, but somehow chargebacks make them squeamish?
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