Tag: MindGeek

Research by STRG_F and Y-Kollektiv comprehensively unveils the unsettling realities of the German-run ChampLife scheme. This scheme sinisterly capitalizes on pushing women onto OnlyFans, exploiting them in a disturbingly orchestrated manner. Touted to offer self-discipline and success coaching, ChampLife insidiously entangles its male members in practices of female domination and exploitation, echoing the notorious ideologies of the globally infamous misogynist Andrew Tate.

In the last days of the Wirecard trial, former Wirecard CEO Markus Braun footed his defense on merchants still considered "big players" in the porn sector. However, their business was not handled by third-party partners in Asia but by Wirecard itself or so-called "white label acquirers" from Europe with whom it had business ties. This is shown by several internal merchant lists with more than 8,000 (!) porn websites listed.

MindGeek S.A.R.L., a company registered in Luxembourg, is one of the world's most important website operators. The company is in porn business, with websites attracting 115+ million daily users. Its PornHub attracts 100+ million users daily. The company and its officers have been accused of facilitating rape, child abuse, and sex trafficking. Multiple lawsuits have been filed in the U.S. Most recently, MindGeed was sold in a strange transaction that financial analyst Evan Armstrong called a scam.

Porn is a wild business. Indeed, the industry satisfies the deep evolutionary needs of humans (predominantly men), but it is doing so with criminal approaches. Activist Leila Mickelwait (@LeilaMickelwait) has been taking action against PornHub and its operator MindGeek for years for facilitating rape, child abuse, and sex trafficking. Her petition to shut down PornHub and hold Its executives accountable for facilitating sex trafficking already has more than 2.3 million supporters.

MindGeek, the Luxembourg-based operator of several porn sites, including Pornhub, Brazzers, and Redtube, was acquired by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners (ECP). The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. MindGeek has been a giant in the online porn industry since. In June 2022, Visa stopped working with the company after lawsuits and public criticism. On Twitter, it is claimed that the purchase of MindGeek was just a fake. Here is a short report.

Recently, the online financial magazine FinanceFWD brought a report about the porn customers of the collapsed German high-risk payment processor Wirecard. For years, Wirecard happily processed payments for the porn empire around MindGeek, for example, for their websites PornHub or YouPorn. Today, the former Wirecard top executives Dietmar Knoechelmann and Ruediger Trautmann and their German-Cyprus Payabl Group are among the leading porn payment processors, Similarweb data suggest.

In 2021, when Commerzbank terminated the account of the porn company Manwin, Wirecard was on the spot. The German fintech did business with the porn industry for longer than ex-CEO Markus Braun portrayed it to the outside world. Wirecard grew to prominence with customers in the gambling and porn industries. Over the years, however, Braun tried to shed the smut image of the early years as best he could. German FinanceFWD recently published an interesting report.

In a recent interview by attorney Lauren Tabaksblat, one of the two Brown Rudnick partners leading the case against Visa and the Pornhub operator MindGeek warned Mastercard and Discover that they would be sued as well. In a landslide ruling last week, a U.S. judge said that Visa may have helped Pornhub “monetize child porn.” Since then, Visa and the credit card companies have not been able to escape criticism. They would knowingly and willingly support illegal activities like child porn with their payment services.

It is a cold case now but still not resolved! Between 2018 and 2020, FinTelegram exposed that a group of Israeli payment processors controlled by Eyal Nachum and his partner Tamir Zoltovsky facilitated binary options and broker scams big style. They worked with entities in Montenegro or the Marshall Islands and with the regulated e-Money Institutions Bruc Bond (previously Moneta International) and International FinTech. In April 2020, the Bank of Lithuania revoked Bruc Bond's EMI license; consequently, the group vanished from Europe, but their scam-facilitating activities remain to be investigated.

FinTelegram has always argued that payment processors are liable for their clients' crimes if they knowingly and wilfully facilitate them. A U.S.judge ruled Friday that Visa helped Pornhub “monetize child porn” a decision that could have long-lasting implications for credit card networks and payment processors. The court denied Visa’s motion to be dismissed from a lawsuit against Pornhub operator MindGeek. The ruling states that there was enough evidence to show Visa knowingly facilitated the crime by providing tools to complete the crime” of distributing child pornography.