> Also I think it is weird that when someone steals a bank card, they use it to buy adult games instead of buying an iPhone or MacBook and shipping it to the third world country.
iPhone or MacBook purchases are expensive enough to trigger fraud detection reliably. A $19.99 adult content purchase less likely to.
It's not just stolen credit cards, though. Adult content purchases have another problem where purchasers often deny having made the purchase when their significant other finds it on the credit card statement. Shaggy's "It wasn't me" defense.
Ridiculous. People who consume adult content could at least behave like adults.
It's a math problem: If a credit card processor takes 3% of the purchase price and the average purchase is small like a $10 item or a $5 monthly commitment, it doesn't take many disputes to blow up their business model. Disputes are costly because you have to pay humans to deal with paperwork and phone calls.
Combined with prevalence of the suspiciously well standardized "because porn users and gamers chargeback Steam purchases way too often" canned responses, I think it's just an excuse, if not "the" excuse somewhere - like the basis for using incorrect data for internal risk modeling or something like that.
Meanwhile other industries like travel have crazy high chargeback rates. This is because it is notorious for a no refund policy / locking customers into purchases months in advance... and then people just chargeback instead of accepting a consumer hostile no refund policy. So travel ends up having high chargebacks... and yet has minimal trouble getting processing.
Nope, not true. They're #2 on Stripe's high risk business list, after porn:
https://stripe.com/resources/more/high-risk-merchant-account...
If this problem were as pervasive as people keep saying it is, it would put the merchants out of business long before it would have any noticeable impact on the card brands (Visa, Mastercard) who are typically the ones actually pushing bans like these[0]. Even if the merchant is successful in winning the chargeback, they are the ones who have to pay the fees for it, which means that any business with a predictable and consistently high enough chargeback rate will just stop collecting payments long before the upstream providers care.
A lot of people here don't actually understand how payment processing, risk underwriting, and chargebacks work - which is fair, because it's an arcane area of knowledge that most people don't interact with! But it means that a lot of things which sound like simple and easy explanations are actually completely off base and nonsensical.
[0] I do not have knowledge of the Kickstarter situation specifically, and the article is light on primary-source details, so I am explicitly not commenting on this specific case.
