Mastercard and American Express are among the credit card companies that have stopped processing payments for material on pornographic websites – but Visa, which has 50% of the market share of total credit card payments outside of China, still allows cardholders to make the charges. AFN spoke with Lena Nealon of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and asked why Visa hasn't seen the light.
"Your guess is as good as mine why Visa continues to do business with websites that are under fire for child sex abuse material, rape videos, non-consensual images," she laments. "Visa, for some reason, continues to turn a blind eye – and we can only imagine that it is because of profit."
According to NCOSE, Visa also processes payments for brothels and prostitution websites like OnlyFans and Seeking.
Nealon notes that a shareholder company that owns stock in Visa – Operating Engineers Construction Industry and Miscellaneous Pension Fund – has taken legal action against Visa in connection with the problem.
"They really want to dig into whether or not Visa is taking seriously that they are potentially helping monetize child sex abuse material, and they're saying that they want to understand the 'disinterestedness' of the Visa board," Nealon explains.
Meanwhile, Visa continues helping to finance the offending websites – and remains on NCOSE's "Dirty Dozen List" for 2022. Nealon's organization is hopeful more shareholders will take action and use information included on that list to send their personal message to Visa to get off the pornography bandwagon.
