US judge insists on visa’s central role

Denver A US judge puts Visa at the center of a lawsuit against porn provider Pornhub. The credit card company had actually applied to be dropped as a co-defendant. But the Californian judge Cormac Carney did not accept that.

The case concerns a young woman whose boyfriend at the time uploaded a video of her to the Pornhub website without permission. She was only 13 at the time of the video and is now making serious allegations against both Pornhub’s parent company, Mindgeek, and Visa.

The credit card company is said to have made it possible for Mindgeek to process payments from advertisers with Visa support. The court “must assume at this point in the trial that Visa was aware that there was a significant amount of child pornography on Mindgeek’s sites,” the judge said, unusually harshly.