Credit card companies, Mastercard, Visa and Discover have ended their relationship with pornography website, pornhub after allegations emerged that the site displayed videos of child abuse (rape).
The credit card companies blocked customers from using their credit cards on Pornhub after allegations were made against the pornography website in New York Times column recently.
After the allegations were made in New York Times’ column, Mastercard began an investigation into the claims against Pornhub and said it discovered that the allegations were true despite pornhub’s denial of the allegations.
In a statement, Mastercard said: “The use of our cards at Pornhub is being terminated. Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site.
“As a result, and in accordance with our policies, we instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance.”
Mastercard also said it was investigating other websites over the possible illegal content.
In the same vein, Visa has suspended the use of its cards for transactions on Pornhub.
In a statement issued to CNN Business, Visa said: “Given the allegations of illegal activity, Visa is suspending Pornhub’s acceptance privileges pending the completion of our ongoing investigation.
“We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek (the parent company of Pornhub) to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network.”
Discover, another financial services company has also blocked payment services with Pornhub.
While making this known via a statement, Discover said: “We require our financial institution partners to monitor for and prevent card acceptance at merchants that allow illegal or any other prohibited activities that violate our operating standards.
“When Discover determines merchants are offering prohibited activity, we promptly terminate card acceptance through the offending merchant’s financial institution.”
Pornhub, which has a lot of customers who carry out a lot of online card payments has now reacted to the access blocks.
In its reaction, Pornhub said the “actions are exceptionally disappointing.”
Pornhub stated that days before the ban, it announced new measures that were put in place to prevent child abuse and nonconsensual activity on its platform, which include removing all content that were unverified and prohibiting unverified users from uploading content on its site.
In a statement, Pornhub said: “This news is crushing for the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on our platform for their livelihoods.”
