Mastercard’s Christmas Present For Porn Buyers
No pics in this post, but just wanted to mention that earlier this week Mastercard ruled against “cross-sells” which are when a site puts a bunch of additional things to buy on the checkout page. Typically they’re toward the bottom of the page below the submit button and they’re prechecked. The end result is that you could sign up for a $1 trial and managed to get billed for 4 or 5 other things at $30 each. So you thought you were spending $1, but your credit card gets billed $150 or more. Then it gets worse, you call to cancel and find that that all of the different items were billed by different companies. You’ll see things like computer support agreements, etc.
The new Mastercard rules change all of that. Now businesses can only cross-sell their own services. So the worst case scenario is that you sign up for Site A and you also get signed up for Site B or maybe a hookup site run by the same company. This will drastically cut down on the problem. The requirement is that things can’t be cross-sold unless they’re routinely sold through the same merchant account, so at a minimum there’s only one place to call to cancel everything, and if there are problems the merchant account that’s causing the problem is held responsible (and can get revoked if there are enough complaints).
Now, I don’t know exactly when the rules go into effect, and they’ll be stronger when Visa adopts similar rules, but hopefully this is the beginning of the end for really slimey sales tactics. If you’ve gotten burned in the past, it should be safer to buy porn in the near future.
