Anyone who's been in the pay site game for more than a day will know about so-called "friendly fraud." For those unfamiliar with it, let me paint you a quick scenario: "Wifey-poo" heads off to her bingo game on Friday night, while her husband stays home and has a couple of beers. Pretty soon, he's no longer looking at bass boats on eBay, but searching for babes over at sex.com instead. Finding a website that showcases (literally) "the woman of his dreams," he whips out his credit card, and then plunks down $29.95 for a little "entertainment" – and all is right with the world. Or at least, that is, until he's confronted by the wife over a "mysterious" charge on their latest Visa statement...
At this point, his choice is an easy one: tell the truth – and face an increased level of misery from "the old ball and chain" – or deny everything, and blame the charge on criminal webmasters and / or identity theft. This typically results in you either refunding the money (despite the fact that it was a legitimate transaction), or incurring a charge back – get enough of those, and you're out of business...
Webmasters know this happens all the time. So doesn't Visa, Master Card, and every bank from here to Timbuktu – but you'll find no sympathy, you sleazy porn monger you, especially when the banks get rich off the fines and penalties you pay for those charge backs – a double kick in the balls (and wallet) for the legitimate webmaster. But we've become used to this, and most will account for it in their financial models.
A New Excuse
While it's easy to come up with a convincing lie to blame mysterious credit card charges on identity theft when you and the mrs. are sitting comfortably on the living room couch – what do you do when she suddenly walks in and catches you pounding your pepperoni "red handed" so to speak? You lie, of course!
You weren't really enjoying the video of that hot little blonde teasing her twat – you were being the victim of an addiction – an addiction that you are powerless to control, and that began when you accidentally opened the wrong email – and as a result, were swept into an evil world of subliminal suggestion and satanic seduction...
Of course, the wife, furious a moment ago, is now sympathetic to your plight – after all, she's heard the media reports about how Internet pornography is "the crack cocaine of sexual addiction" – and now instead of punishing her husband, decides to "do something about it!" – and the next day she writes her Congressman to demand an end to the family-destroying scourge of web-inspired monkey spanking.
Today, Congress is indeed set to look at the evils of sexual addiction and the impact of porn on the family. Police departments are now also collecting pornography found at "crime scenes" in order to draw a statistical correlation between porn and criminal behavior. None of this is good news for our industry.
Even worse than the (understandable) lies of consumers balancing their desire to tell the truth with the realities of maintaining a peaceful home life, is the exploitation of this phenomena by elements within our industry. For example, a recent video release boasts "Mike loves porn. Unfortunately he is blinded by his addiction to XXX entertainment as it slowly eats away at every aspect of his life. One day a mysterious DVD arrives in the mail featuring a beautiful, gothic woman. As the DVD plays, the body count starts to grow and Mike quickly realizes there is a much darker side to the world of adult entertainment." We, as an industry, can really do without this kind of bullshit throwing fuel on the fire.
At the end of the day, folks who take no personal responsibility for their actions are harming our industry, and doing so in a way that no "outside" forces ever could. While I don't (yet) have a solution to this problem, it is something that needs to be addressed in order to ensure the viability of the online adult entertainment industry.
Have ideas on solving these problems? Post them below! ~ Stephen
