Visa and Mastercard, two of the world’s largest payment processors, have repeatedly positioned themselves as corporate moral arbiters, using their financial clout to regulate content they consider “problematic.”
This has been especially apparent in Japan, where they’ve strong-armed retailers into removing legal erotic material, effectively imposing financial censorship under the pretense of “brand protection.” Meanwhile, a recent whistleblower complaint alleges that these same corporations have conveniently ignored their payment networks being used to enable actual child exploitation and trafficking on OnlyFans.
The Attack on Japan’s Creative Industry
Japanese retailers like Melonbooks and Toranoana have been forced to remove or severely restrict certain adult-oriented content, despite it being fully legal in Japan and many other countries. Visa and Mastercard justify these decisions by citing the need to “protect their global brand” and comply with so-called “international standards.”
In response, platforms like FANZA, Fantia, and DLSite have suspended their processing agreements with Visa and Mastercard to safeguard the doujinshi content they host. Unfortunately, others, such as Niconico’s Mature Illustration Service, Niconico Shunga, and Ken Akamatsu’s Manga Library Z, have been arbitrarily shut down due to either financial instability or increased commitment to global ethical standards.
These policies disproportionately target Japan’s doujinshi and adult content industry while allowing far worse activities to continue unchallenged on Western platforms.
Visa and Mastercard’s crackdown on Japan’s legal adult industry reeks of cultural imperialism. By positioning themselves as moral gatekeepers, they dictate which forms of artistic expression are acceptable while disregarding the cultural context of the material they censor. This is not just a business decision, it is a calculated effort to impose Western moral frameworks on a foreign market, even when there is no legal justification for their restrictions.
The Whistleblower Complaint: Visa and Mastercard’s True Priorities
While Visa and Mastercard aggressively police Japan’s legal creative industry, a damning whistleblower complaint has exposed their complicity in something far more sinister: facilitating child exploitation and sex trafficking through their payment networks on OnlyFans.
A senior compliance expert in the credit card and banking sectors has revealed that Visa and Mastercard have been aware since at least 2021 that their networks were being used to launder proceeds from child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and sex trafficking on the popular adult content platform. The whistleblower, along with U.S. federal agents and anti-trafficking experts, repeatedly alerted Visa and Mastercard to these crimes during calls in 2021 and 2022.
Despite federal agents confirming the presence of CSAM on OnlyFans, the credit card companies allegedly “turned a blind eye to flows of illicit revenue.”
Filed in January 2023 with the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), as well as the Justice and Homeland Security departments, the complaint accuses Visa and Mastercard of “willfully failing” to maintain the legally required anti-money laundering programs.
By continuing to process transactions for OnlyFans, they effectively facilitated and profited from these disgusting activities, raking in massive fees as the platform surged in popularity and annual profit.
The hypocrisy in Visa and Mastercard’s enforcement priorities is staggering. On one hand, they aggressively police and restrict Japan’s legal, fictional adult content art created by consenting artists and enjoyed by millions, blocking payments for entirely legal media in its own country of origin under the guise of combatting “child exploitation.”
On the other, they allegedly turn a blind eye to real-world child exploitation and sex trafficking on Western platforms that directly profit from the abuse of actual victims.
This hypocrisy became even more glaring when the whistleblower complaint revealed that in 2021, a U.S. federal agent accessed an OnlyFans account containing sexually explicit images of an underage girl during a call with anti-trafficking experts. When confronted with this disturbing evidence, Mastercard executives simply requested that financial institutions confirm OnlyFans’ compliance with “standards and applicable law,” allowing business to proceed as usual.
Meanwhile, Visa and Mastercard acted swiftly against Pornhub following public backlash over CSAM allegations, cutting off payment processing almost overnight. Their selective enforcement raises serious questions about whether their actions are genuinely driven by ethical concerns or merely dictated by media pressure and political expediency.
Financial Censorship as a Tool for Ideological Control
Visa and Mastercard’s actions exemplify how financial institutions have become de facto moral gatekeepers, wielding their control over global transactions to impose restrictions upon entire countries as privately owned corporations.
Their ability to determine what content can or cannot be monetized grants them immense power over industries, cultures, and nations that depend on their services.
By targeting Japan’s creative industries while allowing real exploitation to thrive elsewhere, Visa and Mastercard reveal their so-called ethical standards as nothing more than a selective, hypocritical tool for controlling narratives that serve their interests.
If their true priority were combating exploitation, their enforcement actions would focus on stopping actual crimes if and when they appear, not suppressing artistic expression from a country that refuses to conform to their cultural biases.
The whistleblower revelations underscore an urgent need for financial alternatives free from the ideological and political pressures of payment monopolies. Cryptocurrencies and decentralized payment systems provide potential solutions, allowing individuals and businesses to operate without interference from corporate overlords who selectively apply morality based on convenience and profit motives.
More critically, countries like Japan should enact federal laws mandating that payment processors including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and American Express, fully honor transactions for legal goods and media within their jurisdictions. Any failure to comply with such mandates should result in expulsion from the country, effectively cutting these companies off from hundreds of millions of transactions across the country.
If payment processors wish to operate in Japan for example, they must respect its legal frameworks rather than impose foreign moral standards on its creative industries. This is the only real solution.
OnlyFans, which boasts over 300 million users and four million content creators, is heavily reliant on payment card transactions for subscriptions, tips, and pay-per-view content. While Visa, Mastercard, and Discover facilitate these payments, platforms like Apple Pay and Google Pay prohibit them for adult content. Mastercard and Visa’s alleged failure to prevent the monetization of CSAM on OnlyFans mirrors their past entanglements with Pornhub, further exposing their selective enforcement and ethical posturing.
In 2020, public outcry led Visa, Mastercard, and Discover to sever ties with Pornhub after accusations that the platform hosted CSAM and other illicit content. However, Visa quietly continued processing payments for Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, an entity that owns and operates numerous other pornographic websites and production companies.
This exposed their so-called ethical stance as nothing more than performative posturing much like their ongoing crusade against Japan’s niche doujinshi creators, whose work remains entirely legal not only in Japan but in numerous other countries, including the United States, where courts have recognized that stylized anime depictions and their corresponding fictional characters are in fact distinct from real life humans and do not constitute representations of actual minors.
Meanwhile, Visa and Mastercard have done little to curb actual exploitation on platforms like OnlyFans, a commercialized sex marketplace riddled with allegations of CSAM, sex trafficking, and illicit financial flows.
Their eagerness to crack down on Japan’s independent artists while turning a blind eye to large-scale abuse on Western platforms exposes the true nature of their priorities: profit-driven moral posturing rather than genuine ethical enforcement.
They selectively punish niche legal businesses while allowing real human exploitation to flourish, all while raking in transaction fees from OnlyFans, which generates billions annually. The reason is simple, Japanese mangakas and doujinshi circles provide far less revenue, making them an easier target for control and suppression.
If Visa and Mastercard are allowed to continue unchecked, they won’t stop at just banning lolicon material; they’ll eventually expand their censorship to all fictional adult content. Their unchecked influence threatens to suppress any form of media, commerce, or expression that fails to align with their arbitrary and ever-shifting “ethical” standards, standards dictated not by law, but by their own ethical motives, PR strategies, and ideological convenience.
The time to push back against financial censorship is now before these corporations tighten their grip on global commerce and creative expression even further.
