Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

VISA and Mastercard have been banning a lot of content that is not porn but has political values that are disapproved by certain billionaires and investors. There is a bunch of links I wanted to post about, such as US billionaires bragging he personally called VISA CEO to ban content on PH or japanese politicians mad at the censorship of japanese art with certain values because of these companies. But I am on phone walking home so if anyone else has such links please post.

They've colluded with the US federal government in the past on those issues as well. "Operation Choke Point" was ostensibly about fraud, but included transactions related to firearms in its scope. As a result, several major banks and payment processors dropped legitimate firearms dealers. For a while it got to the point that I was helping a couple of local gun stores contract with "high risk" payment processors that also serve the porn industry and get set up.

To this day if you're on a gun forum and mention that you use Bank of America, people will pile on to tell you horror stories of both companies and individuals having their accounts closed and funds held for weeks or months after completely legal transactions. In one case in particular, they claimed it happened after buying a backpack at a gun store.

Again, these are 100% legitimate and legal businesses. Federally licensed (FFL) gun stores had trouble for years even keeping a working business account. It was clearly not about fraud, at least not in practice.

Politics completely aside, the financial landscape for gun stores today looks a lot like the cannabis industry: a few institutions are quietly known in those communities to allow them to operate, but many choose to do business only in cash and most prefer it if given the option. The porn industry is similar from what I can see.

Try buying a second hand car and you want cash from the bank. Used to be very easy, but now you need to declare what your spending your money on.

You sold your car. O, its over 7 or 10k, well, this is getting reported to the local IRS. Where is that cash coming from, questions, questions?

Over here they are even cracking down on stuff like ebay, amazon because some people run a business on those sites and do not report the taxes. Result: If you make over 3k in the year on ebay, you need to provided your tax number, or ebay closes your account. And above 3k, it get reported to the IRS.

But wait, what happens if your a foreign national from some specific Asian countries and want to open a bank account? Refused, refused, refused... But you need a bank account for a lot of basic things. Well, tough luck. Lets not talk account closing issues.

And that is the EU, and just normal people. Nothing tax evasion, guns, or whatever. Just everybody putting up umbrella's to be sure, not understanding that when everybody does it, it really screws with people.

They are going crazy with this over regulation. Yes, i understand you want to fight black money but the people who get the big amounts will have ways to hide it. Your just hurting the normal people wanting to know what everybody is doing exactly with every cent.

You see this gradual effort to slowly phase out cash. Cashless payment are getting encouraged, cash withdrawals cost your money more and more, more questions regarding origins (so you say f it, and use bank deposits with release approvals).

Its not a surprise that we seen the increase in cryto usage (and the efforts of governments to control that also).

(I'm not in the US)

I'm curious about how does that happen. Do they reach out to you? Your bank?