Backpage CEO Arrested, Site Likely to Be Shut Down
Texas police arrested Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer on Thursday and will move to shut down the site. The classified ad site is accused of human trafficking through its adult services section, which reportedly makes 90 per cent of its revenues. The arrest was a joint operation between the Texas and California attorneys-general offices. This case does not accuse anyone of providing or paying for adult services with bitcoin. However, digital currency was a popular payment method for site advertisers who could not use mainstream payment channels. Bitcoin brokerage Paxful produced this video,....
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TechCrunch creates a new blockchain series, Backpage.com’s CEO is arrested, and Antshares raises a lot of money. Want to catch up on your latest digital currency and tech news? Check out the stories below. TECHCRUNCH. The news publication will release a six-episode series called “Trust Disrupted.” The topic: cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. TechCrunch seems to believe that Bitcoin and related digital currencies are among the hottest inventions of the last ten years, and the series is aiming to educate the general public about their uses. The series will feature New York Times reporter....
Recently, the classifieds website Backpage was banned from using American Express, MasterCard, and Visa, loudly. The reasoning behind this is that the site is used for sex workers to find customers. The site is said to sell millions of classified ads to women in the United States, and a sheriff in Illinois instigated the shutdown. Before that, MasterCard and Visa had no problem processing transactions for Backpage. Backpage began accepting Bitcoin at some point, and now it is the only form of payment that works for the website. Of course, the Bitcoin network cannot be shut down. But if you....
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,....
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....
Liara Roux. Liara Roux is an "exclusive San Francisco escort," of the upscale variety, and she has been impacted by the recent decision of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express to cut off Backpage.com, a place that people in her industry often solicit customers. Bitcoin is censorship resistant. Even if the government ordered someone to shut down Bitcoin for a site like Backpage, they'd be unable to do it. So long as the people at Backpage could create a wallet, they could receive money. This is by design, considered a feature, not a bug. Whereas with many of the legacy systems, it's....