Maybe your rates are high because of the risk pool you are in.
But why would fraud be more prevalent specifically in the adult content industry than the average over all the industries? Do criminals prefer working in porn than elsewhere? Why? Or do chargebacks simply occur more often due to spouses disputing a charge in an attempt to save face in front of their partner?
It helps that a lot of people have no respect for the people producing the content; they'll happily consume it, but they refuse to acknowledge any work that goes into it or that people should be compensated for what they've created.
The stats I've seen actually did put the charge back rate is high compared to other industries.
What does seem like a scam though is, especially in the digital space, a refund is basically free. The merchant could agree in the case of any charge back the credit card company can just take it back, they won't argue, just take it. They'd even agree to pay the transaction fee.
But you can't, so you get the 20% fee, and you still get the money clawed back from you.
The problem is the VIRP/BRAM requirements push adult content into using only a handful of acquiring banks, and thus there is insufficient competition to get them to lower rates since where else you gonna go?
>How is an adult chargeback ratio calculated?
Divide the number of chargebacks in a month by the total transactions in the same month. The result is the chargeback ratio. Visa and Mastercard both use this formula, with Visa weighting dispute count and dollar volume together under VAMP.
https://sensapay.com/resources/blog/adult-industry-chargebac...
It seems like that sector has 3-4X the disputes and maybe even fraud, independent of your own business practices or success.
To get around this, some sites use less obvious or vague names, but that creates its own category of chargebacks.