A US court has allowed a lawsuit against Visa to go ahead that alleged that the financial services company helped monetize sexual videos involving children on Pornhub, owned by porn site operator MindGeek.
Judge Cormac Carney in California issued the ruling, rejecting Visa’s attempts to dismiss its portion of the suit, reports The Verge.
The lawsuit alleged that Visa plausibly “intended to help MindGeek monetize child porn” because it continued to offer payment processing services to Pornhub “despite knowing the site had failed to moderate videos of minors”.
In a statement to Variety, Visa said it “will not tolerate the use of our network for illegal activity”, but “we continue to believe that Visa is an improper defendant in this case”.
According to the plaintiff, “Visa recognized MindGeek as an authorized merchant and processed payments to its websites including but not limited to Pornhub”.
The lawsuit said that Visa knew MindGeek’s sites contained a substantial amount of child porn and that MindGeek failed to police its sites for such content.
Nonetheless, “Visa and its agent banks explicitly agreed with MindGeek to continue to process transactions without restrictions on all MindGeek sites provided MindGeek maintained pretextual window dressing claims that it had technology, processes, and policies in place to prevent such content”.
Visa was “aware of MindGeek’s trafficking venture and explicitly agreed with MindGeek to process the financial transactions from which the defendants profited from the venture”.
The lawsuit asserted that MindGeek, Visa, and others violated a series of laws including the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) and the California Unfair Competition Law (UCL).
“Visa lent to MindGeek a much-needed tool — its payment network — with the alleged knowledge that there was a wealth of monetized child porn on MindGeek’s websites,” wrote Carney.
