Payment giants Mastercard and Visa suspended accepting payments on the popular porn site PornHub after the scandal over its earnings from underage models. Reuters reports.
Following an internal investigation, Mastercard has permanently ceased working with PornHub. Visa paused payments until its investigation is concluded.
PornHub’s management called the payment systems’ decision ‘disappointing’.
“This news has stunned hundreds of thousands of models who rely on the platform for their livelihoods,” the company said.
The site announced policy changes — it banned downloading videos and restricted uploading of videos. The payment systems paused payments two days after the changes.
Mastercard and Visa began investigating PornHub following The New York Times publication about underage content on the porn site. The author, Nicholas Kristof, urged financial companies to sever their partnership with the site.
Back in November 2019, PayPal suspended payments to PornHub’s models. At the time, many users suggested the site start accepting cryptocurrencies as an alternative.
Since 2018 the site has supported payments in Verge, Horizen and Tron.
In January 2020, the site added the stablecoin Tether as a payment option.
In September, PornHub allowed paying for access to premium content bitcoins and Litecoin.
As of writing, the site supports premium-account payments in Verge and payouts to models—in Verge and USDT using the Omni, ERC-20 and TRC-20 protocols.
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