It really boils my blood that it is still so hard for artists etc to get money from people for making stuff without some multinational dracula sticking their slimy hands in everyone's pockets and/or banning them for making the Wrong Kind Of Art, while eg Tether has been running an open air money laundering operation for years now unpunished, moving billions in dark money for the wealthy, most of it probably going towards genuinely harmful shit. The "legitimacy" of a given transaction in the eyes of payment services is a fig leaf for how much it benefits the largest, best-positioned capitalists (and the marks they're currently sucking money out of).
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in reply to @vectorpoem's post:
🫠 real. even if you don't make NSFW stuff it can get dicey. i had to remove stripe payments from my ko-fi this month because-- and i did not know this-- they don't allow you to use their service to take tips and they seem to have a very dim view of crowdfunding or anything they can sort of shove under the umbrella of crowdfunding.
like. it's money. it's fucking money and you get your cut of it and you're still finding new ways to exclude creatives???????????? god. if it's because it's considered "high risk" i can't think of anything riskier than fucking crypto, which every payment provider is still happily gobbling up even though we all know it's literally fake
It's largely a measure of how likely the processors think a transaction is to be reversed, which impacts the profitability of being the middle-man.
Artists get ripped off or abused by their clients all the time, so helping them get paid is a hassle and a liability. Small transactions, lots of overhead. Worse still, most artists don't have much money (for some reason), so you can't collect fines from them. Terrible customers for a payment processor.
White-collar criminals like cryptobros often get away with their crimes, at least for a while, and by virtue of being financial criminals they usually have lots of money. If their schemes blow up in their face and they end up in court, there's still a good chance you'll be able to collect on their debts. Excellent customers for a payment processor.
historically, payment processors have been willing to offset high-risk clients with exorbitant transaction fees. recent legislative efforts in the US to hold payment processors and content hosts legally liable for the user-generated content served or sold in a nominal (and largely ineffective) effort to curb human trafficking and csam is causing many processors to pull out entirely. this is also a bit of a legislative stalking horse used as a reach-around ban on pornography as a whole. queer culture frequently gets swept into this category as well. this is by design, of course
One thing I don't get is how are NSFW artists excluded from using Visa or Mastercard, or limited by patreon, or get kicked out of sites that used to allow smut, yet hundreds of spammy "free sex video +18" porn websites are still up.