Visa has suspended service to online payment processor ePassporte, effectively freezing whatever assets porn affiliate websites haven’t already skimmed from their partners.
Of course I kid.
Anyone who has dealings with the increasingly offshore world of porn affiliate businesses knows ePassporte, which is one of a few international payment processors — similar to PayPal — that deposits porn website membership payments into a user acccount, which then may be transferred into a bank account or, until last week, accessed by an ePasssporte Visa card.
Headquartered in Curacao, ePassporte is also used by thousands of mainstream businesses, so Visa’s suspension of service comes as a huge blow to the company, which has yet to update its website and still advertises Visa services.
So let’s say I ran a Spain-based porn website with gigabytes of paid content. I partner with you, an American webmaster, and thousands of people like you, to put links to my site on yours. When a reader of your site clicks through to mine and buys some movies or downloads some pictures, you earn a percentage, or revenue share, as my affiliate. Of course, you rarely have any real way of knowing how much you’ve made, and sometimes I just won’t pay you at all.
Ha ha! Fool!
Anyway, for reasons Visa has not yet disclosed, it has suspended its partnership with ePassporte, meaning that users will no longer be able to pay with a Visa card for porn content on sites that use ePassporte and that special ePassporte debit Visa cards will no longer be valid.
According to Slashdot, the speculation so far is that Visa cut ties with ePassporte due to new anti-money laundering restrictions in the Credit Card Act of 2009, which affects prepaid cards and other payment card instruments that can be reloaded with funds at places other than financial institutions.
As porn, online casinos, and other potentially shady operations are always worried about running afoul of credit card companies, savvy affiliate businesses usually have a few payment options available, so if you are a Visa/ePassporte customer, I’m sure you’ll get your cash sooner or later.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Pink Visual sues porn tube sites
See also: Visa suspends ePassporte electronic money service
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