<story><title>Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?</title><text>For reasons beyond this ask, I&amp;#x27;m needing to use a payment processor that is fine with high-risk transactions (which the porn industry certainly fits in) so started looking around what adult websites are using.&lt;p&gt;Many are using probiller, vendo and similar, since Stripe and others have rules against porn&amp;#x2F;adult industry, citing high risk transactions for this.&lt;p&gt;But then I came across onlyfans.com, which is using Stripe for its payments, although Stripe has a strict &amp;quot;no porn&amp;quot; rule in their terms of service.&lt;p&gt;How does this work? Onlyfans is by now a huge website, with lots of transactions, so it&amp;#x27;s surely not flying under the radar. It&amp;#x27;s the only adult website I could find that is using Stripe.&lt;p&gt;Is it as simple as they have an agreement with Stripe to bypass the rule? Or am I missing something else obvious here?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>techsin101</author><text>loading across multiple providers won&amp;#x27;t alter the chargeback ratio so what is the point?</text></item><item><author>mrdumas</author><text>Since, I know a friend in this industry, let me explain what&amp;#x27;s going on here. Yes, OnlyFans uses Stripe, but that&amp;#x27;s not the entire story.&lt;p&gt;In the adult&amp;#x2F;porn world, there&amp;#x27;s a high amount of chargebacks and fraud relative to low-risk industries like SaaS software. If you pass a certain chargeback threshold in the adult industry, your account is terminated, and no payment processor will do business with you.&lt;p&gt;To reduce the likelihood of passing that chargeback threshold and being banned, OnlyFans uses &amp;quot;cascading payments&amp;quot;, which essentially load balances the payments across multiple payment processors in order to reduce their chargeback ratios across their merchant accounts.&lt;p&gt;The payment is either processed by Stripe, Securion, CCBill(the leading payment processor for adult), or another company.&lt;p&gt;Last time I checked the network requests, I noticed it was storing the card on Stripe, CCBill, and Securion, but using CCBill or Securion to process the payment.&lt;p&gt;I think Stripe is there for models on the site who don&amp;#x27;t sell adult content. OnlyFans probably does a check to see if the page is adult-related and if it is, then routes it to the correct payment processor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fooey</author><text>Chargeback ratio&amp;#x27;s are per account, but also have a minimum absolute threshold. So it&amp;#x27;s say, 2% chargeback AND at least 200 chargebacks before penalties kick in.&lt;p&gt;In a past life I worked for a place who had a few hundred processing accounts to load balance it all out because their chargeback rates were way too high. If an account gets close, you just don&amp;#x27;t use it for a month, or you throw a bunch of &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot; recurring charges at it to dilute it, or you hold a batch and send them through right before the rollover. Lots of ways to play number games.&lt;p&gt;Most of the execs did go to prison though, so don&amp;#x27;t take this as advice, but to be fair, the processors are the ones who told them to use those tactics.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?</title><text>For reasons beyond this ask, I&amp;#x27;m needing to use a payment processor that is fine with high-risk transactions (which the porn industry certainly fits in) so started looking around what adult websites are using.&lt;p&gt;Many are using probiller, vendo and similar, since Stripe and others have rules against porn&amp;#x2F;adult industry, citing high risk transactions for this.&lt;p&gt;But then I came across onlyfans.com, which is using Stripe for its payments, although Stripe has a strict &amp;quot;no porn&amp;quot; rule in their terms of service.&lt;p&gt;How does this work? Onlyfans is by now a huge website, with lots of transactions, so it&amp;#x27;s surely not flying under the radar. It&amp;#x27;s the only adult website I could find that is using Stripe.&lt;p&gt;Is it as simple as they have an agreement with Stripe to bypass the rule? Or am I missing something else obvious here?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>techsin101</author><text>loading across multiple providers won&amp;#x27;t alter the chargeback ratio so what is the point?</text></item><item><author>mrdumas</author><text>Since, I know a friend in this industry, let me explain what&amp;#x27;s going on here. Yes, OnlyFans uses Stripe, but that&amp;#x27;s not the entire story.&lt;p&gt;In the adult&amp;#x2F;porn world, there&amp;#x27;s a high amount of chargebacks and fraud relative to low-risk industries like SaaS software. If you pass a certain chargeback threshold in the adult industry, your account is terminated, and no payment processor will do business with you.&lt;p&gt;To reduce the likelihood of passing that chargeback threshold and being banned, OnlyFans uses &amp;quot;cascading payments&amp;quot;, which essentially load balances the payments across multiple payment processors in order to reduce their chargeback ratios across their merchant accounts.&lt;p&gt;The payment is either processed by Stripe, Securion, CCBill(the leading payment processor for adult), or another company.&lt;p&gt;Last time I checked the network requests, I noticed it was storing the card on Stripe, CCBill, and Securion, but using CCBill or Securion to process the payment.&lt;p&gt;I think Stripe is there for models on the site who don&amp;#x27;t sell adult content. OnlyFans probably does a check to see if the page is adult-related and if it is, then routes it to the correct payment processor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PeterisP</author><text>You can direct most of the payments towards the cheap-but-prudish processors, and the really adult stuff towards a processor that accepts almost anything but is more expensive.</text></comment>