It's Official: Backpage Forced into Cryptocurrency-Only Business
The personal ad site Backpage has just had its payment processing terminated by both Visa and Mastercard, following termination by American Express last year. This week, a few phone calls from Chicago-area bureaucrats were enough to get Backpage officially sanctioned by nearly the entire banking establishment. Rainey Reitman, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote: "We shouldn't have informal pressure from public officials forcing financial service companies into deciding which types of speech should and shouldn't be allowed. MasterCard and Visa are not supposed to....
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Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer was arrested in Houston on Thursday in relation to an outstanding California warrant for multiple charges including prostitution, according to Reuters. The website has been the focus of a three-year investigation in the state of California regarding its online advertising of sexual services, and accusations of child trafficking for the purposes of sexual abuse. The two states say they have evidence of forced prostitution. A joint investigation by the offices of the Texas and California attorneys general uncovered evidence that adult and child sex trafficking....
Coin Cafe is meant to be an easy way to buy and hold bitcoins, but they apparently do not like people attempting to use bitcoins at the free classifieds provider Backpage.com. After the problems that the website had in the last several weeks, with all of its other merchant processing accounts closed, Bitcoin has garnered some coverage. However, it appears that users of Coin Cafe are not welcome to use their hosted wallet to purchase services from Backpage.com. The site seems almost hostile to those who would use its services to hire ads from Backpage.com. It seems this is a company policy,....
Paxful was chosen by Backpage.com to provide users with bitcoins when the company was shut down by Visa and Mastercard. Now that Paxful is up and running, they've had their hands full teaching many people the basics of Bitcoin in the process of selling it to them, so they can place their ads on Backpage.com. Now the company has made a video to ease the process for Backpage.com users. Also read: Chicago Sheriff Barred From Tampering With Backpage Funding. In plain language, the process of buying bitcoins and spending them at Backpage.com is explained. The video aims to take some of the....
Following the news that Backpage had launched a lawsuit against Chicago-area Sheriff Thomas Dart, the company has made more headway, winning a "restraining order" against the outspoken sheriff. He will no longer be able to make "de-funding" efforts against Backpage.com. Lawyers for Backpage.com are pushing to have the Sheriff rescind his letters to MasterCard and Visa, which would amount to an apology. There is no way for Backpage.com to force the credit card processing companies to start working with them again, but if the companies knew that the Sheriff's threats of legal action were....
International classified ad sites Backpage.com has switched to providing exclusively cryptocurrency payments for its adult entertainment section. As of July 9, users posting advertisements of an adult nature, such as escort services, must use Bitcoin, Litecoin or Dogecoin to pay any posting fees. The move makes Backpage the first mainstream resource of its type to experiment with a cryptocurrency-only payment model. On July 7 Backpage, which is headquartered in Texas, announced the suspension of fees for the adult section, in response to Visa and MasterCard’s refusal to continue servicing....