Jan 24 (Reuters) - Mastercard and Visa failed to stop their payment networks from laundering proceeds from child sexual abuse material and sex trafficking on the popular website OnlyFans, according to allegations in a previously undisclosed whistleblower complaint filed with the U.S. Treasury’s financial crimes unit.
The whistleblower, a senior compliance expert in the credit card and banking industries, said the two giant card companies knew their networks were being used to pay for illegal content on the porn-driven site since at least 2021, and accused them of “turning a blind eye to flows of illicit revenue.”
The complaint was filed in January 2023 with the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the U.S. Justice and Homeland Security departments, the whistleblower said.
The complaint said that the whistleblower and other anti-trafficking experts, including U.S. federal agents, alerted Visa and Mastercard to unlawful content on OnlyFans in a series of calls in 2021 and 2022. The federal agents corroborated the presence of child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans, the complaint said.
Who tf is paying for CSAM with regular ass money? Isn’t that great for law enforcement since t hey can just track a payment to a person and slap the whole mc chicken out of them?
Lots of the people involved in CSAM are stupider than you might think, surprisingly bad at privacy/security given that almost everyone including governments hates them.
Criminals in general are stupid. They tend to lack impulse control.
The actual smart ones don’t get caught or steal legally.
You right tho.
how would visa/mc know? surely all they see is “payment of $5 to onlyfans inc”
In 2020, Visa, Mastercard and Discover blocked customers from using their cards to make purchases on Pornhub, another big adults-only platform, after a public outcry over alleged child sexual abuse material and other illegal content. This stopped card payments for Pornhub’s paid content and forced it to rely more on ads and sales of user data.
Yep. The idea was to completely block payments to entire OnlyFans it seems.
Seems like stopping access to porn in general is the aim. This is just the excuse
“OnlyFans has a moderation problem and can’t properly prevent CSAM and sex trafficking on its platform”
“Well, it’s clearly the credit card companies fault”
🙄
Hope the hell are the payment processors surprised to know? It would seem to me that OF would be the ones accountable to monitor content on the site?
Money laundering is incredibly complex now, but it’s still pretty dang hard to hide, especially if you’re a credit card company with just a metric shitload of data with a ton of available compute to find it.
I think the important bit isn’t necessarily that they were hosting content, but funneling money - which is an important distinction. The content may not have been hosted there, but the money was still being funneled through there to pay for illegal content.
An analogy, occasionally you see something make the rounds from facebook marketplace. “Half eaten mcdonalds sandwich. $600”. Everyone laughs and says how stupid is that - but is it? Or is it a completely legal transaction if someone buys it. It’s just that what you don’t know is that on another platform they were asking to buy drugs, and said “To transfer the money go buy the half eaten sandwhich on FB”.
If FB knows that’s happening and doesn’t stop it, that’s on them because they’re allowing money laundering to happen.
OF in this case probably didn’t even host any content - but they probably knew that money was being funneled for other activities and it’s on them to stop it. Take it as a lesson folks, if you let money flow through your site (even a completely above board site) between two parties - you’re at risk of something like this.
You’re describing the internet though. If two people meet in a public space and conspire to commit a crime, the public space isn’t fined. In the same way that if two people on Lemmy meet and then conspire to commit a crime, the space shouldn’t be fined. If OTOH the platform owner was made aware and didn’t take action, then yes that would be aiding a crime.
It’s not about the messaging - the money flowed through OF. That’s the illegal part, OF allowing money to transfer through them for crimes makes them complicit. That’s why FinCEN is involved.
- Person A wants to buy something illegal from Person B.
- Person A cannot send money directly to Person B, as it leaves a paper trail/it may be illegal/sanctions/there are also lists of known bad actors
- Person B tells Person A to instead buy <<some product>> on a random site, in this case OF
- Person A buys the product, money flowing to OF, looks like a normal transaction
- Person B receives money from OF, also appears to be a normal transaction, and there is no direct link between A and B except hidden behind the scenes through OF’s bank account (which has millions of other transactions, none of them linked)
Finance has rules about keeping logs about what money was transferred from who to who, why, when, and for what. If those logs are not meticulous and precise, they will come in and shut you down. In this case we see Visa and others also get wind, they want nothing to do with feds coming in and shutting them down (remember if they’re aware of it and allow it to continue they are also liable), and that’s how we get here.
Source: I worked FinTech at an exchange for several years, and we were sued by multiple agencies for things we weren’t even aware of (years after they even happened). If you want to pay people out through your system, first hire a team of lawyers.
I’d just open a church if I wanted to launder money.
“Boy cash donations were way up this week. Praise the flying spaghetti monster! Our sauce pot overflowith.”
They have rules against using their services for that kind of stuff. Once they’re made aware of the rules being broken (which they were), they should enforce the rules by stopping service. The same as if you report CSAM on a website to the hosting service and they take down the site. The hosting service is not the one accountable, but it would get in trouble if it comes out they knew about it and didn’t do anything.
They would enforce the rules of their payment card network. Once they’re aware of a violation they take action. If they become aware of a series of violations they take further action to ensure the merchant complies in the future.
I thought this is OnlyFan’s responsibility.
I don’t know specifically about Mastercard and Visa, or other jurisdictions, but I recall in my country that financial institutions have responsibility too. Finance is a major part of child exploitation just like it is with other organized crime, and they have a decent amount of power to analyze and flag suspicious finance networks, and governments benefit from compelling them to look into money instead of simply accepting it.
