A trade group for payment processors is accusing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. of improperly pressuring banks to cut ties with merchants in the pornography business.
In a court filing Thursday, the Third Party Payment Processors Association alleged that FDIC examiners coerced and intimidated banks to end their relationships with companies that processed payments for porn businesses.
The examiners’ push happened shortly after the FDIC’s release in 2011 of a list of industries that it said warranted heightened attention by banks, according to the court papers. The list of industries included pornography, ammunition sales, payday lending, purveyors of racist materials, dating services, Ponzi schemes and coin dealers.
Complaints that banks have been ending their relationships with people in the porn industry as a result of regulatory pressure have been percolating for months, but Thursday’s court filing brings them to the attention of a judge.
“FDIC examiners’ targeted enforcement against the pornography industry was the advent of its improper practice of moralistic regulation over the banking industry,” the filing argues. “Regulators did not target the pornography industry because there was evidence of fraud relative to that industry.”
FDIC spokesman David Barr said in an email that the agency does not comment on active litigation.
The FDIC withdrew the list of so-called high-risk industries in July, saying that it had been misinterpreted to mean that the categories of merchants listed were prohibited or discouraged.
The payment processors’ allegations were part of a friend-of-the-court brief filed in support of a payday lending trade group that sued federal banking regulators in June.
The suit, filed by the Community Financial Services Association of America, accuses the FDIC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve Board of trying to drive payday lenders out of business by exerting pressure on the banks they depend on to access the payment system.
In response to the suit, lawyers for the FDIC wrote in an August court filing that any decisions by banks to cut ties with payday lenders were the banks’ own business decisions.
Source American Banker
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Those of us in BDSM porn started having this problem with banks right after W. came into office, bringing John Ashcroft with him. I bitched about it frequently on the editorial page of Taboo. At the time, we were dismissed as paranoid cranks, despite some pretty compelling first-person testimony from those who had dealt with censorship-by-bank themselves. So ten years after the fact, we finally get some validation for what we could see plain as day. It’s a little late to help those small website operators put out of business by this extra-legal, privatized vendetta against certain content, but better… Read more »
Yeap, plain as day that Obama and his cronies wanna shut you down..