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Hackbraten

Why do you think the porn industry is prone to more fraud/risk?

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A man orders porn and pays using his credit card.

His wife looks at the statements and asks him what he’s up to.

He denies having made the payment so the wife initiates a chargeback.

Yup. My uncle worked at a bank and had to deal with this quite often.

Even better, at least in the UK, the bank had tools to find out what the subscription was for and whose name it was in,

I kinda wonder if it isn't the kids doing it with a parents card.

My friend and I were 13 and called 1-900 numbers back when it was popular. We took his moms credit card and changed some numbers around. Eventually a number we made up worked.

It was a hilarious moment but I was scared to death we would be found out. Nothing ever happened but somebody got a charge.

Do they not ask for a CVV or any other verification?

We did something surprisingly similar once as stupid kids/teens and it was in the days before CVV. Just touch tone to enter a card number (although we did this little experiment from a payphone using a 1-800 (toll free) sex line). Typically, you entered a card number after some initial "pitch".

AFAIK, 1-900 numbers only worked by billing you on your phone bill.

Guess I'm showing my youth, because I've never seen a credit card be used without a CVV. And I think that's a poor security model…

It was at the end of the 90s maybe 2000. Messing with pay phones or prank calling on one was another fun thing to do. The good numbers (1-900) didn’t work on pay phones. ;-)

Call collect!

Haha I guess if your credit card failed they just billed the line. His brother most likely got blamed for it.

In the 90s many sites didn't ask for CVV, including AOL. And many gas station receipts printed the entire credit card number. And that's how some kids got online in the early-mid 90s...

I seem to remember using fake CC generators that didn't really "work" for billing but they would pass basic muster to activate the 30-day trials in their software. In retrospect this was moronic because it couldn't have been that hard to figure out where these obviously fake trials were being set up every month but somehow it worked until I was able to get a university dial-in account or a "cracked" version of those free services that showed an ad window in exchange for free dialup (the cracked versions hid the ad window).

Heck, Amazon doesn't even ask for a CVV.

Because the government will close your bank accounts if they discover you are making money off pornography.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa8xy9/is-the-doj-forcing...

What I don't understand is that that this isn't even illegal, so how could the government possibly argue that those accounts should be closed?

Because the government insures those accounts for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. If you want to benefit from the insurance then you can only use the account for purposes allowed by the insurance contract which excludes "high risk" activities which is defined to include essentially all sex related services.

I thought the government insures those for when the bank burns down. How does my employment come into play here?

Aren't bank accounts required to be insured? Is there any legal way to offer a "high-risk" bank account?

The porn industry has been known in the past to have some very shady people working within it. They would use the porn as a front for other illicit activity. The have used porn to launder money from those other activities. Credit card fraud is a huge part of that. If you are into stolen credit cards while owning a porn site, you just subscribe to expensive recurring plans. It's not really hard to understand why it's considered risky.

Why didn't they use non-porn for such activities and money launder? What is the substantial difference between porn and any other expensive subscription? E.g. you build a garage, name it notaws (or whatever service was expensive back then) and launder an ocean of fraud through it. Why must somebody get banged in the process?

You're assuming this is an either/or situation. Criminals spread their money all over the place. Porn just has so much money going through it that it makes it very tempting and lucrative.

Because back in the 90ies when credit cards didn't have CVV etc and you could simply generate "valid" credit card numbers, everybody used them to get access to porn.

And still today, porn accounts are next to netflix & co on the DNMs. It's a sought after thing that's digital. Carding material products is much harder and riskier.

Back in the 90s, they lead in affiliate programs; Every major porn company offered like $30 or more per member. Lots of fraud in those days.

Once you get the video or pics there's nothing stopping you from copying and redistributing it I guess. Unsure how it compares with other media types.

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