Tag: Pornhub

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.

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.

In the last few weeks, as part of our Wirecard Legacy series, we have started research on high-risk processors for the porn sector. Wirecard was one of the payment processors for the porn empire of the MindGeek group, which operates the porn sites YouPorn and PornHub, among others. In addition, xHamsterLive and StripChat are also large porn sites operated by Technius Ltd, which is registered in Cyprus. Epoch is involved as a payment processor, among others. We would like to know more.

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.

A landmark ruling in Germany establishes that porn portals based in other European countries are also regulated by German youth protection authorities. The Higher Administrative Court (OVG) in Muenster has rejected complaints by two porn portals from Cyprus against a ban on distributing pornographic Internet offerings in Germany. In doing so, the court upheld the Administrative Court's decisions in summary proceedings in Duesseldorf. Minors evidently are a target group of the international porn industry.

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.