Monday, March 21, The Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS), comprised of compliance professionals from the financial services sector, including compliance officers from Visa and Mastercard, hosts its annual conference; “Reinventing Tomorrow’s AML: Ideas Into Action”. As this conference takes place, Awareness is Prevention (AIP), calls on the boards, shareholders, and CEOs of Visa, Mastercard, and of credit card-issuing and merchant-acquiring banks, including Metro Bank, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of New York Mellon, to stop their products and services from being used to purchase online Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), revenge porn, and explicit material featuring victims of sex trafficking, on the social media platform OnlyFans.com. While many of these companies’ Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Financial Crimes divisions will attend this conference as participants and even panelists, to this date many of these companies continue to enable and facilitate criminal activity on OnlyFans.com by not employing effective age verification and consent procedures as part of an effective AML compliance program.
Through AIP’s efforts, concrete and actionable evidence has been provided to Visa and Mastercard that disturbing and illicit sexual activity occurs regularly on Onlyfans.com and that the website has done little to stop its production and distribution. AIP has cited specific examples from law enforcement, reputable media sources, Victim Service providers, and open-source intelligence research documenting this activity. Unfortunately, these efforts have been largely ignored, most likely because providing financial services to OnlyFans.com and others like it is immensely profitable. But corporate behavior can change, and shareholders, stakeholders, and all of whom are invested in quality AML practices can drive that change. AIP urges Visa, Mastercard, and the issuing and acquiring banks to work with AIP and other stakeholders and define how they can more effectively respond to the fact that their products are, perhaps inadvertently, facilitating the “big
business” of selling children for sex. AIP calls upon Visa, Mastercard, and the issuing and acquiring banks to commit to such cooperation, and to issue an agreed-upon document reporting the results of such collaboration.
“AIP is for accountability and common sense,” said AIP’s founder, Lena Walther. “We’ve adopted a multi-pronged approach to raising awareness and crackdown on the worst offenders in the Child Sexual Abuse Material and human trafficking space, including OnlyFans.com. We are asking for Visa and Mastercard and top banks to prevent the use of their products from being used for child sex trafficking and other such exploitation routinely promoted on the platform, and consider only authorizing the use of its products for non-adult content on OnlyFans.com as practiced by other payment processors.”
For the past year, AIP has worked closely with federal and local law enforcement, federal financial regulators, Members of Congress, academia, and other anti-trafficking nonprofits, to investigate and expose sex crimes regularly occurring on Onlyfans.com, including rape, child rape, revenge porn, trafficking, and the distribution of child sexual abuse material.