Visa draws a hard line on child porn

The giant credit-card company Visa sponsors the Olympics, the National Football League, and NASCAR. "It's everywhere you want to be," proclaims its ads.

But now, Visa has taken an unpublicized stance on where it doesn't want to be: on Internet sites selling child pornography and other depictions of sexually deviant behavior.

Over the past year, Visa has set up a system to identify purveyors who use Visa to sell illegal pornography. This means the card issuer is reporting sites with illegal photos and videos to the global police forces responsible for enforcing child-porn laws.

Visa is also requiring the 7,000 US 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 - a threat already facing a Russian bank.

After searching more than 1 million Web pages a day for the past year, Visa estimates that 80 percent of the 400 websites it has identified as child porn have either been shut down by law enforcement or have had their Visa privileges terminated. In fact, the company says pedophiles in chat rooms are complaining that it is increasingly difficult to find websites 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. However, more recently, websites have sprung up 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 and released by British police. 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 websites. 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 US 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."

However, if MasterCard is conducting any programs similar to Visa's in searching for illegal sites, it won't discuss them.

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