Payment Processing Woes; Wishtender and a Rapidly Shrinking Ice Burg
Banking discrimination is not a new phenomenon, but why do we act shocked when it happens?
When will we accept that it’s never been about the sex, it’s always been about big banks and the government getting their overly big piece of the pie while also claiming that their hands are clean?
This week, popular gifting platform Wishtender announced suddenly that Stripe, their solo platform for payment processing, was no longer going to be working with them and that in just several days payments were going to be shut down for the foreseeable future. In other words, get your money and GTFO, ladies.
Of course, this has been met with shock across the industry and anger at yet another platform that has failed us, but can we really blame them? Many people used the platform not to receive gifts but to process deposits, having already become paranoid (and rightfully so) about Paypal, Cashapp, Zelle, and Venmo, who all have very public stances against sex work and sex workers. Wishtender, which was founded by sex workers and seems to have made it no secret its desire to serve the adult industry, found itself playing with fire when it started allowing people to use it as a payment processor in itself. Labeling something as “shopping spree, 1k” felt a touch removed, and therefore safe, but as the numbers of people using Wishtender shot up, so did, obviously, the scrutiny.
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