Aug 23 2006
Loophole
For access restricted AmeaNet sites we use external payment processors so that we do not have to store credit card data on our own server. We are no security experts. I will not to go into detail about our experiences with payment processors in general. Let’s just say that I have lost a considerable amount of money over the years selecting companies to handle our payments without ever receiving the money of those transactions. The strategy is simple; most payment processors handling payments for adult sites are in the US. They look at Ameanet.org as a porn site – or a high-risk site. I do not agree with that, but I am dealing with account managers here, who think that a copy of Leda and the Swan by Michelangelo should be filed under ‘bestiality’ often spelled by them as ‘beastiality’. Freezing our account and taking our funds does not bother them too much, since they know we have no real options to fight this kind of fraud. A few phone calls to an international law firm would drain our funds more than just cutting our losses.
At one point I just picked the biggest mom and dad payment system there is. I knew they did not handle adult sites at all, but I figured they were too busy money laundering and calculating their kick-backs to check our sites for content. That worked very well for two years. When this same payment processor opened a UK branch, our content was in fact checked and the Brits saw no real conflicts with existing User Policies.
Some time ago the same payment processor opened a Dutch branch. Well, at least that is what they claim it to be. There is no office here, just a p.o. box and a Dutch BV (Inc.) for tax reasons, I assume. A call to their Dutch telephone number gets diverted to the UK or US offices.
A few weeks ago payments almost completely stopped coming in. We figured it was the holiday season. After a week however, a Dutchman subscribed to one of our sites and that is always a noteworthy event. It happened five times over the last few years. We checked the site and saw that the language of the external signup pages was changed to Dutch. No problem, we adjusted the settings in our profile and the problem was solved. The next day the page was changed back to Dutch again. This went on and on for quite some time. We kept calling them and they kept apologising.
Yesterday we have spent 6 hours on the phone to solve these problems and in the end they sent us a hefty manual on how to change language settings. It was a two-hour read because the search option of the digital document did not work too well, but when we finally found the option to change the language; it turned out to be the same option we had used from the start.
We do not give up that easy so we changed the language setting once more, but now the pull-down menu had lost all functionality. I switched to US English a dozen times, but the signup page stayed Dutch. So if you are checking this blog to find out what the hell is happening at AmeaNet, you will know that we are not trying to chase anybody away. We have just dived into another Ultimate American Loophole, as one of our visitors described it.