did a lovely journal about their contact with a Paypal manager about some of this very matter. I'll still do my research too, but here is some more immediate information from yet another first hand account. Link
I definitely saw this coming, ha ha. I am getting all sorts of tidbits of information and mixed responses about Paypal allowing adult material, and if so, what kind. So, what I'm going to do is contact as many people as I can, and give you all the information I can find on the matter.
First, I'd like to talk to as many artists as possible whose accounts were banned for selling adult artwork via Paypal. If you are or know artists who are willing to talk to me about the details of why and how they were banned, please let me know so I can reach out to them. I'm wondering if Paypal is against certain kinds of adult material (like cub art, feral art, or other things that toe the line of legality when put in an IRL context), or if accounts who were reported for adult content also had other things they were doing that unknowingly violated the user agreement (fee dodging, etc).
Second, I'm going to email Paypal several times from different emails asking them to clarify about "obscene and sexual materials", so we can have a bigger sample size of what this means, specifically. I urge as many of you as possible to do the same, so we can share the info. From what I understand currently, it seems to only prohibit physical sex (prostitution, porn videos), but again, I want to verify this.
Third, I recently learned from two separate users that Paypal apparently has a sort of morality committee, similar to how movies get sorta arbitrarily rated. I'm emailing this department as well, and linking them to specific, pornographic examples of artwork, so I can get clear answers on what is okay.
And lastly, even if it turns out selling drawings of porn is totes okay 100%, you should still always be careful and never label your payments as such. The porn industry is a very gray area, and our culture is not a sex positive one. There is always the possibility that all of this could change in a hot minute, and you'll wind up in a heap of trouble with a frozen paypal account. In my previous journal I made a section called "Treading Lightly with Paypal" for a reason. Give it a look over if you haven't already, because this is important advice for buyers and sellers alike, okay?
I look forward to finding out more about this. It's a matter that's bugged me for a long time, and I really just want to know the facts on how worried we all actually need to be about this.
I think these efforts are going to be relatively futile. I feel very confident asserting, based on what I have read from the TOS and what I have heard from those who have contacted them, that the reality is, while they are reserving the right to do whatever the fuck they please to whoever they please, it is unlikely they will use the nuclear option on the ordinary furry porn artist or go on a proactive crusade.
The TOS is very vague and would permit the company to act aggressively against a user of the service in most or any violation of it. Thus, paired with the stupidity of many people, many PayPal employees are going to give many different interpretations of the ToS or who they would go after so severely, rather than state what I have. However, humanity and companies generally aren't completely devoid of intelligence, either. They realize if they start fining people 2;500 as a primary method of violation penalization, there would be a MASSIVE uprising and they would both lose business AND have a class action lawsuit on their hands.
So, I would not be very concerned about all this. However, do not trust those who say, "Oh, no, no! The ToS really means just this and this situation!", either. If they meant what people are telling you the ToS would specify accordingly. They want to make people afraid and have the right to nuke people they really don't like, but they will rarely do so unless you do something criminal or the person handling your case just absolutely despises you.
I think these efforts are going to be relatively futile. I feel very confident asserting, based on w
See, I thought as much as well at first, that the TOS was worded vaguely just to cover Paypal's ass, but after speaking with some of the artists who have had their accounts suspended, I think it needs to be analyzed more thoroughly. I'm doing my best to get a cold, hard list of "yes and no" about the matter.
See, I thought as much as well at first, that the TOS was worded vaguely just to cover Paypal's ass,
I'm not privy to the discussions you've had with artists, so my ability to comment intelligently is extremely limited. My impression with the information I have, however, is Paypal needs to be alerted somehow to prohibited activity to get involved and suspend people's accounts, and does not use extreme measures to detect prohibited use. The worst I see them doing is using some tool to flag accounts/transactions if the payment notes contain certain high-risk words, and I have been told invoices preclude such an occurrence (assuming the artist doesn't use such language in the invoice).
So many furry artists violate PayPal's ToS out of necessity because traditional works are rarely done nowadays and, inscrutably, PayPal has a problem only with digital porn. PayPal is akin to Facebook and FurAffinity: we have to use it because there's no feasible alternative. PayPal is a greedy company who doesn't particularly care about its customers and seems to be especially hostile towards furries, but the alternatives in this day and age would come with severe drawbacks and we are able to use their ubiquitous service 99.5% of the time with no complication. So, we generally say, "Alright, fine, I'll use PayPal despite my hatred for them."
The chance of destructive action by PayPal is generally very low, and the chance of that action being nuclear in scale is also relatively low. That being said, there are ways things can go wrong. Some artists are unaware of what to NOT do to appear on PayPal's radar. A few commissioners (1% or less) are malevolent. To some people, what furries draw is bestiality, and many pictures are to those people even more objectionable and repellant (I guess cub porn would be 'child bestiality porn'; I don't know whether people of that mentality generally hate that more or less than the human varieties). Because of the nature of furrydom, we are at an especially high risk of negative action by PayPal, but they have no way of knowing the specifics of a transaction unless someone's careless or malicious, and therefore the chance of a disaster is still very low.
Of course, this is the risk per transaction. Even if the chance of a mishap is 0.1%, that's 1 in 1,000 commissions or transactions ending in PayPal acting aggressively. So, some artists sooner or later will face sanction by them, which can range from a warning to a 2,500-dollar fine. Usually it's a warning or a suspension, but, as per their ToS, they MAY decide, for example, to fine someone 2,500 for drawing 'bestiality child porn' or whatever. I don't advocate people dumping PayPal in a fit of anger or panic over this, but I do caution artists to be prepared for an account suspension at some point in their careers if they make a living from artwork and will draw porn.
I'm not privy to the discussions you've had with artists, so my ability to comment intelligently is
Something else I wanted to add.. I don't know if it's a good thing or not. But if we're in the USA we can request paypal send us a PayPal MasterCard linked to our paypal account. This has one benefit that I'm not sure folks know. You can go to any ATM, and minus the ATM fee of like $1 - $2 or so, you can make a withdrawl and get physical money out of the account and there's no restrictions to how often you can do this.
So say if you think you're worried about paypal freezing your account, and you use your art sales to pay real life bills, buy food, etc, you can goto a local ATM and withdraw the physical cash as soon as your customer's payment clears your account. And by "As soon as" I do mean within seconds of your account showing a positive amount in the paypal website. This one time I've stood at a atm and looked at my account with a smart phone waiting on someone's payment once and tapping refresh on my smart phone for my account on the website, and then stuck the card in the machine and have the cash come out right away.
So my reason for saying this, is because a few things. If you really need to pay rent that's late, or buy food right now, you can use this card and get money near instantly as physical cash, and there are no additional fees other than what the local ATM charges.
One of the benefits of this is if you think your account is in jeopardy or risk of being closed soon, you can "cash it out" and then even if the account gets closed or locked down, then you still have the funds from it. And you can also bypass the 3-5 day wait to transfer to your bank account this way.
Something else I wanted to add.. I don't know if it's a good thing or not. But if we're in the USA w
This is excellent information. I plan on writing a journal, eventually, that will sort of teach furry artists how to use Paypal in the safest way they can, and this would definitely be a great thing to include in that. Keeping your Paypal account empty of funds is a good practice to adopt, but waiting the 3-5 days can be nerve wracking if you are expecting trouble ahead.
This is excellent information. I plan on writing a journal, eventually, that will sort of teach furr
Yeah, furry porn should not be fraught with such hazards. I just want my knotted raccoon porn. I don't see why this should be in a special category according to payment processors.
Yeah, furry porn should not be fraught with such hazards. I just want my knotted raccoon porn. I don
