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 news here is that Visa and MasterCard haven’t (yet) blocked all income for OnlyFans and its creators, over unproven allegations of kiddie porn. That earns a hooray from me, but I’m sure, with just a little more public panic, OnlyFans will be driven out of business, which is the endgoal here.
Reuters has a real hard-on for OnlyFans. A month ago, 2 of the same 4 bylined reporters wrote this peculiar piece:
Multiple OnlyFans accounts featured suspected child sex abuse, investigator reports
The gist of that report was that, listening to an “experienced child exploitation investigator,” Reuters found 26 OnlyFans accounts featuring models who “appeared” to be underage.Of course, at an operation the size of OnlyFans, 26 ain’t many, and "appeared underage” is an awfully low bar. They require models to show proof of age, which all the pages in question had on file, and the site took the pages down immediately anyway. I’m not seeing how OnlyFans could be more rigorous, except by getting out of the porn business. Which, again, is the endgoal here.
Like the previous article, this latest ‘news’ is only anti-porn hysteria, a gift to Republicans and righteous hypocrites.
But they’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent normal healthy sex work, or even sex work adjacent folks.
