Visa and Mastercard finally stop doing business with Pornhub

Visa, Pornhub, and Child Sexual exploitation. When does a payments provider become an enabler?

There are two types of payments, good and bad, and as Visa have just found out, you can’t take the profit from the good and claim not to be responsible for the bad!

When images of abused people appear on the internet, who is at fault? The platform or the person posting probably come instantly to mind, but what the payments provider? For years, Pornhub has knowingly hosted and monetised child sexual exploitation materials, real-world sexual abuse recordings, videos of human trafficking victims and many forms of other non-consensual content. But a spanner has been thrown in the works in a recent court case against Visa, which could have wide-reaching effects for victims.

The company was sued for providing the tool used to monetise child pornography by a woman whose underage images were posted without consent. Visa denied that, as its payment system could be used to purchase ads on MindGeek’s porn sites, it monetised child pornography, and it seeked to have the case dismissed.

However, in July US District Judge, Cormac Carney, ruled that Visa can be sued, saying that “Visa is not alleged to have simply created an incentive to commit a crime, it is alleged to have knowingly provided the tool used to complete a crime.”

Carney also said that, at the current stage of proceedings, “the Court can infer a strong possibility that Visa’s network was involved in at least some advertisement transactions relating directly to Plaintiff’s videos.”

Subsequently, Visa, Mastercard and other financial companies finally completely cut their ties with Pornhub and other sites associated with its parent company, MindGeek. Visa had already stopped processing payments on the site in 2020. However, it still facilitated those related to advertising.

A company representative from Visa said: “This pre-trial ruling is disappointing and mischaracterizes Visa’s role and its policies and practices. Visa will not tolerate the use of our network for illegal activity. We continue to believe that Visa is an improper defendant in this case.”

It shouldn’t have taken so long for a court case to remove payment providers’ services from these sites. Action should happen before companies are sued. Before court cases. Before they are forced. They should choose to do the right thing.

I wonder when online service providers and social media platforms will be held accountable for the illegal and harmful content they facilitate. So many lives are destroyed beyond repair, needlessly. And for what?

I also wonder if these crimes would take another shape or form if outlets like Pornhub and big tech didn’t exist. Do they just facilitate the inevitable? Or are they incentivising new forms of abuse and exploitation by not taking stronger measures (or sometimes any at all) to halt these heinous crimes on their platforms?

They have had a free pass for too long.

At RedCompass Labs, we are working towards a future where no one can profit from these abhorrent crimes, through any kind of channel. With our RedFlag Accelerator, financial institutions can pinpoint criminals’ actions among a sea of data, including  child sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

We work on good payments and bad. We believe at our core, that all payments providers who enable payments have a responsibility to also protect the innocent from those payments systems, schemes and platforms being used against them.

But, by working together, we can help put this exploitation to an end.

To learn more about how we can help you uncover, disrupt and investigate financial crime, get in touch with our team of experts today.