reuters.com
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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.

  • Hexadecimalkink
    51·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      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.