Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/14/paypal-pauses-payouts-to-pornh.html
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“Following a review, we have discovered that PornHub has made certain business payments through PayPal without seeking our permission."
that is none of your fucking concern! you are just a fucking payment system! thats what you are for! What the actual fuck?!?!
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Isn’t EVERY payment through paypal made with paypal’s permission? What the fuck does this even mean?
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Huh. It’s almost like the libertarian dream of the internet is complete horse shit… like maybe we shouldn’t have ceded control of public communication and commerce to these privately-held unaccountable mega-companies.
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Paypal has never permitted any “adult content” payments, however they’re more than happy to be their cut of your fees until it becomes (or they think it will become) a PR problem for them. Someone at a stockholder meeting probably brought it up.
It’s great having your livelihood subject to the whims for countless nameless corporations, isn’t it?
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Don’t use paypal?
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I feel like this will backfire catastrophically for PayPal… This seems like quite a large, comuputantionally competent, alternative community to have shunned…
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How and why does PayPal have any say in this? This is completely fucked up. Here is hoping PH sues the hell out of Paypal.
This vaguely reminds me of the issue I just had with Western Union. My girlfriend is Filipino. We have been dating for 4 years. She and I travel back and forth between Seattle and Cebu. I am the primary bread earner. I use WU to send money to the GF when she is there and I am in the US to cover basic living expenses such as the rent for a our condo.
For 4 years there have been no problems sending money. Then a few weeks ago a transfer kept failing to go through. It looked like a service issue. I called them after a day of failures. I was told the system blocked the transfer but they wouldn’t say why. I was transferred to a security department that grilled me over the phone in a way to strongly implied but did not say that I was either being scammed by a stranger online or I was doing something criminal.
This was followed up with an email from them explaining I could ask for a review of my case and listed documents I could provide but of course never said what I was defending against which makes defending oneself rather difficult.
I provided proof of my income to answer the question where the funds came from that were sent. I provided receipts for things purchased to answer the question what the funds were used for. I provided every plane ticket either of us has used to travel back and forth to show we have a real world relationship and I’m not just sending money to a scammer. In all total I collected and sent around a dozen supporting documents. And typed a fairly detailed essay about how we met, how we handle commuting back and forth and what are future plans are.
After waiting 10 days I got an email thanking me for my detailed response but that they decided to stick with the original decision and I am blocked from sending or transferring money through WU for life. 
I replied to that email pointing out that online criminals use stolen or fake identities along with burner phone numbers and emails when doing whatever illegal stuff they do. When they get flagged like this they don’t spends days collecting defense documents, they just switch to a fresh identity. But I only have one identity, so their security algorithm will in time filter out good customers hit with a false positives while doing nothing beyond a minor inconvenience for proper criminals.
As I was going through this I searched online and found many families/couples had gone through the same thing.
Being vaguely accused of serious crimes is fucking maddening.
ETA: fixed typo
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“PayPal pauses payouts to PornHub porn performers”.
Fixed. Alliteration is not for dilettantes.
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Sex workers once again get screwed. And not on-camera, either.
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wow, when did WU get all “care about the law-ey” ? ( not that there’s anything unlawful about your circumstances ). I used to work for a telecom co. that initially did their own money transfer, later began to offer WU services. “Got 100,000$ cash you want to send to ‘Bobby in L.A.’ ?” ; “Sure, no problem, that’ll be 25,000 cash fee.”
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Perhaps your GF can just withdraw the money out of a nearby ATM?
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I had wondered if something had happened in the background to cause a shift, but the posts by people went back many years so this seems to not be new. It may be that the security department has a quota to meet to show they are doing something much like the junk that the TSA pulls to show they are doing something, even if it is not effective.
No worries. I knew it was possible, some folks might think I must have been doing something sketchy and just omitted it. But the first rule of doing something sketchy is don’t draw attention to yourself. I don’t have anything to hide and am still fuming about this whole ordeal.
One thing they mentioned in passing was that they have to work with the governments of receiving countries. I have noticed on several occasions, PH bureaucrats have a real hate for their fellow citizens if they are not overtly rich. (not saying everyone of course, just a trend I have seen). The first time my GF flew here to the US, the immigration in PH held her for nearly an hour and half asking questions before they would let her leave the country. When she got here the big bad US immigration took less than 5 minutes to let her through. Another time when she was traveling to Malaysia for vacation, the immigration person in Malaysia was a filipina that seemed hellbent on not letting her into the country.
So I don’t know if this is coming from WU or PH but either way, if Ive done something, accuse me of it so I can either defend myself or learn to do whatever differently.
We have a shared credit card so many purchases can be handled with plastic. But much of the PH is still cash only. When she is here in December I’m going to open a shared account with her in my US credit union so then she will be able to use ATMs to get cash wherever she is. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of that before this kerfuffle. But she won’t have that card in hand until she gets here next month.
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given the importance of remittance to the Philippines you would think they would be eager to facilitate the process…I guess the tin star effect works everywhere. Sorry about your difficulties
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Thank you. The biggest frustration is just not knowing what happened. Did I send too frequently recently? We just moved to a new condo so there were a bunch of extra costs around moving, deposits, getting some service work done, etc. right before the banning happened.
I will never know.
I agree. But I think in reality the volume of money being moved works against everyone. There is so much money flowing into the country some of it MUST be illegal and there is the stereotype of corruption in the PH, which just makes whatever agency get a hard on to go bust some baddies no matter the collateral damage.
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PornHub, owned by Luxembourg-headquartered company MindGeek, said it was “devastated by PayPal’s decision to stop payouts to over a hundred thousand performers who rely on them for their livelihoods”.
That’s a lot. Were these the kind of jobs allegedly created by Ivanka?
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A couple of friends of mine are notorious pornography performers that post on a large adult social network, and tried using onlyfans.com to generate some side income
They have a worldwide following on said network, but in a matter of 2 months, onlyfans stopped all payment to them citing conjured up reasons.
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PayPal also forced Patreon to stop dealing with adult-content creators a couple of years back if memory serves.
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That PayPal management doesn’t believe in body-sovereignty, has decided to use financial coercion to stop sex workers from working and are too chicken-shit to come out and say what they’re plainly up to. The only thing more mealy-mouthed than a corporation is a corporation managed by puritans. Banks in California did the same thing to sex workers a few years ago, deliberately underbanking them to impose their religious bigotry. These are sanctions intended to control other people’s bodies; nothing more, nothing less.
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performers perhaps? perfect p’s plainly possible.
prior point previously pondered. props.
probably purposeful. “ocd clickbait” 
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