[UPDATED] Exclusive: Visa No Longer Accepted At Sean Cody, Men.com, And All MindGeek Sites
This story has been updated below.
Following an explosive New York Times article last week detailing the presence of child abuse, revenge porn, and rape videos on Pornhub, credit card giants Mastercard and Visa announced that they would stop processing payments for the MindGeek-owned tube site. And now, Visa is no longer processing payments at MindGeek’s original content studios, including gay brands Sean Cody and Men, as well as straight brands Brazzers, Reality Kings, and more.
The only way customers can join one of these studios now is with Mastercard. As seen below, the join page for Sean Cody (and all other MindGeek original content studios) shows Mastercard as the sole payment option:
While the Visa logo is still there (in faded black and white), potential customers can’t select it as an option. The same goes for Discover and JCB cards.
A rep for Probiller (MindGeek’s billing processor) confirmed with Str8Up that Visa was removed from MindGeek’s sites yesterday. (It’s not clear when Discover and JCB were removed, although it was presumably done this week, after they announced that they too wouldn’t be processing payments for Pornhub.)
Following the NYT report, Mastercard announced that they were cutting ties specifically with Pornhub, while Visa had indicated in their statement that they’d be severing ties with all MindGeek brands pending an investigation. “We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network,” the company said. Many had correctly feared that this would include MindGeek’s original content brands.
The removal of Visa from Sean Cody, Men, Brazzers, et al. is another catastrophic blow to MindGeek, and it’s a ripple effect of the Pornhub disaster. Sean Cody and Men videos, for example, are legally produced films with consenting models and crews, unlike the content on Pornhub exposed in the NYT piece. While there’s no comparison between the illegal videos on Pornhub and Sean Cody videos featuring paid adults having consensual sex, Visa and Discover aren’t differentiating MindGeek’s brands, unfortunately, and they’re all paying the price.
UPDATE: A MindGeek rep re-confirmed what ProBiller told Str8Up, but the rep added that the removal of Visa “should only be temporary.” I’ll update this story again should Visa resume processing payments.
UPDATE 2:
After not processing payments for over a week during their “investigation,” Visa (as well as Discover) has resumed accepting payments on all of MindGeek’s original content sites. (The credit cards are still not accepted on Pornhub, however.) As you can see below, all the cards are in color now and able to be used on Sean Cody:
[SeanCody]
Also, MindGeek is currently accepting cryptocurrency and gift cards (some of which are seen below) as payment. Did you ever think a Starbucks gift card would get you access to some of gay porn’s best creampies?
[SeanCody]
