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BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)

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328 points beeburrt | 3 comments | 16 May 25 06:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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rwarfield ◴[16 May 25 07:07 UTC] No.44002548[source]▶
We have normalized the treatment of the financial and payments systems as things that exist primarily to perform law enforcement surveillance functions. It's the same dynamic that leads to debanking of small accounts - payments firms exist on thin margins and the potential fines for inadvertently servicing a bad actor are stratospheric, so it's entirely logical to play it safe by refusing to service anyone whose profile looks even the slightest bit risky.
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elric ◴[16 May 25 07:59 UTC] No.44002858[source]▶
Debanking small accounts isn't something that I'd heard of before. But debanking "undesirables" is certainly a problem.

Over here (Belgium) we have legalized prostitution, but it's very hard for sex workers to open a bank account. There's some legislation that forces banks to offer them a basic bank account (at a steep fee) if they can prove that they've been rejected by N banks. Which is a start, I suppose.

Banks have basically become an extension of law enforcement, tax collectors, anti-terrorist operations, and morality police. Which is ironic, given how many banks brazenly break laws on the regular, how absolutely depraved parties with bankers are, etc. They're hardly paragons of virtue. Yet they get to gatekeep "virtue".

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1. throwaway2037 ◴[16 May 25 09:22 UTC] No.44003339[source]▶

    > Over here
Where? NZ/AU?
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2. elric ◴[16 May 25 09:55 UTC] No.44003519[source]▶
Belgium. Edited the post to make that clearer, thanks for pointing that out.
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3. throwaway2037 ◴[16 May 25 16:41 UTC] No.44007447[source]▶
I thought EU has a civil right to a basic bank account. (Please correct me if wrong.) Literally, if you are a convicted violent criminal, they cannot deny you for basic bank account (after released from jail). If sex work is legal and these rejections are actually happening (this is the Internet after all), I cannot believe that a Belgian law firm has not taken the case on pro-bono to sue a bunch of national banks that refuse to open accounts for sex workers. Again, if the rejections were true, it would be easy to build a case. Sure, you might be rejected at lower court levels, but then you can climb (after many years) to the European Court of Justice. I am sure they will agree: These legal sex workers have the civil right to bank in any EU jurisdiction where they are a legal resident.

I just Googled for: sex workers denied bank accounts in belgium

And found this: https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/blog/2024/-/asset_pu...

    > Since summer 2023, a new law has extended labour rights also to sex worker employees, including rules around working hours and payment, the right to refuse clients and the mandatory availability of emergency buttons in every room. The new law also decriminalises third parties, who will no longer be penalised for opening a bank account for sex workers or renting out accommodation, and it allows sex workers to advertise their services.
To be fair: Your comment was true in the past. It looks like there has a been a recent turn of events.