According to a recent report, a group of international campaigners and campaign groups claiming to work to tackle sexual exploitation have contacted numerous credit card companies to block payments to adult websites.
If successful, this could raise the case for cryptocurrencies to replace credit and debit cards, and to serve as payment options.
Per the BBC report from yesterday, more than ten campaigners and campaign groups have signed and sent a letter to numerous credit and debit card companies. Those included the so-called “Big Three”- American Express, MasterCard, and Visa.
The campaigners claimed that porn sites “eroticize sexual violence, incest, and racism” and stream content that features sex trafficking and child sexual abuse. Therefore, the signatories, which come from countries like the UK, the US, India, and Australia, have requested the immediate suspension of any payments to pornographic websites.
“We have been seeing an increasingly global outcry about the harms of pornography sharing websites in a number of ways in recent months. We in the international child advocacy and anti-sexual exploitation community are demanding financial institutions to critically analyze their supportive role in the pornography industry, and cut ties with them.”- Said Haley McNamara, the director of the UK-based International Center on Sexual Exploitation.
India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) recently published a report concluding that searches for child abuse on pornographic sites had increased substantially in the past several months.
Contrary, one of the most popular adult platforms, PornHub, said that “the letter was not only factually wrong but also intentionally misleading.” Later, PornHub added that its policy has always been to “remove unauthorized content as soon as we are made aware of it.”
The report outlined that MasterCard was investigating the claims expressed in the letter. Should the firm confirm any illegal activities by a cardholder, it will “terminate their connection to our network.”
Ultimately, if all credit and debit card companies indeed block payments towards adult websites, it could leave the door open for digital assets to replace them.
In fact, something somewhat similar happened to PornHub last year. The company announced that the large online payment system company PayPal has cut off payouts to “over a hundred thousand performers who rely on [PornHub] for their livelihoods.”
At the time, PornHub was already accepting TRON (TRX) and Verge (XVG) as payment methods.
Shortly after, the adult platform also added the most widely adopted stablecoin – Tether (USDT), issued on TRON’s network.
Most recently, PornHub integrated the blockchain-based payment protocol PumaPay.
“With an uptick in crypto adoption, adding PumaPay to the list of cryptocurrencies PornHub accepts allows us to better cater to the millions of crypto holders around the world.”- said PornHub VP Corey Price at the time.