And why is the payment processor doing that? Because they're afraid of the government. Why? Because the government doesn't like boobies. Why? Puritanism...
AFAIK, the only place government wrings the hand of payment providers is for terrorism or they want to specifically choke a political actor.
In Patreon's case, I'd imagine it has to do more with fraud, or more specifically how the "big" payment providers won't touch porn. (After all, the big porn sites have been processing credit cards since the dawn of the internet, just not through the same avenues as a eCommerce store would go through, if the government really cared, those sites wouldn't be able to process credit cards either).
I see Patreon uses both PayPal and Stripe as their payments processor - Stripe has pornography spelled out in its term of service as prohibited, and PayPal is far less lenient when it comes to breaking their ToS. I can imagine as Patreon grows, Stripe and PayPal (who in turn might be getting their screws turned by Visa and Mastercard), might start forcing Patreon to deal with these creators.
It's a very unfortunate spot Patreon is in, and I hope they aren't forced to cleanse their platform.
IIRC in 2011 this was due to the terms of their contract with their banking partner, Wells Fargo. I suspect this is still the case.
This is due to the "I shouldn't have spent money on that" feeling when the user is done with the service. You'll also have fraudulent cards because there's no physical location they need to order things to to test that the card works. Probably an aspect of underaged users using parents cards due to the nature of the content and a cherry on top in the form of money laundering as the services allows the user to receive money.
As it's a service not goods it's much more easy to chargeback. I'd imagine places that sell adult products have less of an issue, because they have proof of goods.
Your reasoning that that in itself would be sufficient to refuse service does not hold up.
To clarify also it's not my reasoning. Adult content is referenced in the Terms of Service for all payment processors, whether they allow it or not. See Stripe for an example[1]
[1] https://stripe.com/gb/prohibited-businesses#ip-infringement-...
http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/rssExec.pl?Submit=Disp...
Here is the engadget article:
https://www.engadget.com/2015/12/02/paypal-square-and-big-ba...
I think strong regulations, something like: Visa/Stripe/PayPal/Amazon have to service every business that is not illegal, would also help these companies against such "moral guardianship". They don't have to look like they are defending the rights of perverts to their other customers.
I heard porn sites have a CC processing fees of 20+%.
Setting up a CCBill account for adult content doesn’t seem like it’d be that big an ask, for an organisation so outwardly committed to supporting their customers.
Nah, due to the nature of the purchase, it's almost entirely about what happens when the monthly statement arrives and the wife gets a hold of it before you do.
"No, honey, I don't know anything about those charges on the credit card statement. Someone must have stolen our card information."
It also doesn't help that historically all those "age verification via credit card" routines inevitably enroll users in opt-out autobilling for services they legitimately don't want and end up disputing. The industry brought this on themselves.