I woke up this morning and found this on page three of the
Arizona Republic....
NEW YORK - Giant credit-card company Visa has undertaken a huge unpublicized battle against Internet sites selling child pornography.
Over the past year, Visa has set up a system to identify purveyors who use Visa to sell illegal pornography. The card issuer is reporting sites with illegal content to the global police forces that enforce child-porn laws.
Visa is also requiring the 7,000 U.S. financial institutions that are members of the Visa association to register "high-risk merchants" who process adult content and use the Visa card. If the institutions don't comply, they risk losing their Visa relationship.
After searching more than 1 million Web pages a day for the past year, Visa estimates that 80 percent of the 400 Web sites it has identified as child porn sellers have either been shut down or had their Visa privileges terminated. In fact, the company says pedophiles in chat rooms are complaining that it is increasingly difficult to find Web sites oriented toward them.
"This is a powerful new tool to assist law enforcement in these crimes, to eliminate a resource for individuals to use, download and purchase pornography," says Reuben Rodriguez, director of the exploited-child unit at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The use of credit cards to buy child porn is relatively new. At first, many pedophiles traded images over the Internet in chat rooms. More recently, Web sites are selling access for a fee. Only last month, rock star Pete Townshend admitted he had used a credit card to join a child-porn site. He was questioned by British police and released. In addition, police forces around the world are still combing the files of a Dallas couple who sold hundreds of thousands of subscriptions to child-porn Web sites. According to people involved in tracking child porn, officials will soon begin another round of arrests.
Visa and MasterCard, the two leading credit-card companies, have long cooperated with the FBI and U.S. Customs to make cases against buyers and sellers of child porn.
"Whether money laundering or child porn, our rules absolutely require our cards to be used legally," says Sharon Gamsin, a vice president of MasterCard in Purchase, N.Y. "If we find a site is doing something illegal, that site gets thrown off our system."