Wetlook World Forum

The powers that be in Vi$a and Ma$terCard are adding tighter and tigher control on 'Adult' businesses (I'm not going to comment of the political aspects to this).  For this reason, Multicards, and many other card processing companies are restricting what we can do.

Already US Banks have had to stop handling offshore clients, and the latest news from the European banks is that they are only able to process orders for Tangible Products (VHS + DVDs, not streamed content or memberships).  This sounds fine for me (Minx Movies) for example, but wait a minute, there are contiditions...

The website is only allowed to show 'box covers', not any 'previews' ( picture galleries, or AVI/MPEG downloads) UNLESS they are 'protected' by an 'Adult Check' type system.  I can only presume that this is Vi$a and Ma$terCard's vague attempt to 'clean up' the Internet.

If they manage this to acheive this, then before you enter ANY vaguely adult site that is selling stuff then you will need to subscribe (and pay annually for) an 'Adult Pass'.  This will hurt all WAM producers, we barely scrape enough sales to cover our costs, and anything that puts off casual browsers is very bad news.

Even inside the US you are going to have problems, I've recently switched my transaction processing to ozbill, based in Australia, but there are moves afoot to block or question any US citizen making a 'foreign' (outside US) payment !!!  So much for the land of the free. (I've already had 1 customer's card turned down, they had to contact their bank to complain before the transaction finally went through).

Personally I am voting with my wallet, I will be applying for an Amex card later this week, Vi$a and Ma$terCard can go whistle for any more commission from my shopping.

Nigel