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

(www.pcgamer.com)
713 points freedomben | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.462s | source
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miiiiiike ◴[19 Jul 25 01:02 UTC] No.44611570[source]▶
Look. Ignore the content. Why the fuck do we allow credit card companies have a say in how we spend our money?

Fraud? Abuse? Fine, let me put cash onto a card and if that card gets stolen, oh well, my loss. Mastercard should have no say in what what speech is considered acceptable outside of their offices. We don't care what execs at a water company think? Why do we care about the people at Mastercard?

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SJC_Hacker ◴[19 Jul 25 02:04 UTC] No.44611910[source]▶
Because they are on the hook for fraudulent transactions, until they get to merchant to refund. Otherwise they wouldn't care.

Which is why some merchants get effectively blacklisted if they have too many fraudulent transactions

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lxgr ◴[19 Jul 25 03:09 UTC] No.44612226[source]▶
The card networks are never on the hook for fraudulent transactions (nor for any other type of chargeback for that matter). If anything, it's the merchant's payment service provider/card acquirer that absorbs the loss if the merchant can't pay.
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1. zhivota ◴[19 Jul 25 05:00 UTC] No.44612719[source]▶
True until the acquiring (merchant side) bank is insolvent. Then the network pays. Source: worked at Visa for years.

It's why it's so hard to become an acquiring bank on the network.

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2. lxgr ◴[19 Jul 25 13:29 UTC] No.44615316[source]▶
True – I was debating whether I should mention that edge case :)

I think the general idea is that acquiring banks are hopefully large enough to absorb any single merchant insolvency, but there are obviously limits to that. Airlines and event tickets are notorious example of that, since they usually take payment weeks or months ahead of providing the underlying service but want to get paid immediately.