Chargeback and Fraud Mitigation Policy

1. Before the payment

• Every price is shown in full, in the charging currency, on the item itself, before payment. Directly under the Subscribe button the fan reads the price, the period, that, paid by card, it renews every month until he cancels, and paid any other way it ends with the paid month with a link to renew by email (a bundle of several months does not renew), the date of the next renewal and how to cancel with one tap, how he pays and how it will read on his statement, the refund policy, and the support address. When the subscription renews, pressing Subscribe is the agreement to that renewal, and the sentence says so.
• That exact wording is stored with every purchase, together with the time, the IP address and the device, so a dispute is answered with the words that were on his screen.
• An age confirmation and the terms stand before the first purchase, and the consent is recorded against the account.
• How a charge reads on a statement is published on the billing page and on a page of its own, a charge on your card statement, written for the person who searches that text.

2. After the payment

• Every purchase is confirmed by email at once: what, from which creator, the amount, the date, the statement text, a link to the purchase history, a link to cancel a subscription, the fan's agreement to immediate access in the words he agreed to, and how to report a problem. It is a transactional email and cannot be switched off.
• Before every renewal the fan gets an email 3 days ahead with the creator, the amount, the date and a button that cancels it with one click without signing in. A subscription paid any other way does not renew automatically: the fan is emailed 3 days and 1 day before it ends with a link to renew. Neither email can be switched off. A renewal at a higher price than the fan agreed to does not happen at all without his new agreement: he is emailed, and the subscription ends with the month he paid for.
• Every purchase is listed in the fan's account with its date, amount, creator, statement text and a link to what it bought.

3. A clear refund policy, and a person who answers

Before paying, the fan asks for immediate access and accepts that the right of withdrawal ends once the content is available, in one short box with a Confirm button that links the terms and the refund policy (the time, the version of the wording, the IP address and the country are recorded), and the agreement is stored with every order and repeated on the receipt. Within 30 days of any purchase the fan can ask for a refund without giving a reason, because a refund is better for everyone than a dispute. After 30 days we refund when the problem is ours (content that does not load and cannot be fixed, a double charge, a purchase not delivered) or the payment was not authorised. Next to every purchase the fan has Report a problem with this purchase with the choice I want a refund, and a person replies within 5 business days. A refund goes back the way the fan paid and access ends with it. Accounts that refund again and again lose card payment (more than 3 refunds in 30 days) and then every way to buy (more than 5 in 90 days, or a second card block). The rules are on the refunds page.

4. Cancelling is the fan's own to do, and there is no conversation in the way

A fan cancels a subscription himself, from the creator's page, from the list of his subscriptions, or from the reminder email, at any time and without telling us why. There is nobody to persuade, nothing to phone about, no form to wait on and no retention offer standing between him and the decision. Cancelling stops the next renewal. The period already paid for is kept to its last day, nothing further is taken, and until it runs out he can resume without paying again.

A cancellation made in the account is the whole of it: we stop the billing at the payment processor as well. He is never asked to cancel the same subscription a second time somewhere else, and never has to ask his bank to stop a payment that we could have stopped for him.

This matters to a disputed charge more than any fraud tool does: a person who can stop a payment stops it, and a person who cannot disputes it.

5. Reaching a person

Customer service and cancellations are published on the billing page, on the contact page and in the footer of every page, without a login. The support address is also on the purchase screen, in every purchase email and in the purchase history. A person replies within 24 hours.

6. Who may take money, and what may be sold

• Only an account verified against a government issued document and a live camera check may publish, sell or be paid. The detail is in the age verification policy.
• Every uploaded file is screened before publication. Anything flagged is held and does not appear at all until a person has reviewed it, and every decision is written to a log with the name of whoever made it.
• Material involving anyone other than the creator cannot be published without a consent record for that person on file.
• Attempts to move a payment off the platform are detected and reported for a human decision, because a payment taken outside the platform is a payment nobody can refund.

7. Stopping stolen cards before they pay

No card is charged today. The card controls in this section start when card payments are added, and are described now so that nobody has to take them on trust later.

• When card payments are added, 3-D Secure will be requested on every card payment, the first payment of a subscription included, with no exception for small amounts or returning customers. A payment where the check fails, because it was not completed or the bank declined it, will not be accepted and the fan will be asked to try again. A card whose bank does not take part in 3-D Secure, common with cards issued in the United States, will still be able to pay. A card issued in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, where strong customer authentication is required by law, will have to pass the check unless an exemption the law allows applies.
• Only an account with a confirmed email address can pay. A new account has a spending ceiling for its first 24 hours, and every account a ceiling on purchases per hour.
• Payment attempts are counted per account, device, IP address and email address, and past the hourly and daily limits payment pauses. When card payments are added, repeated failures will also mean the next attempt needs a CAPTCHA. A monthly subscription starts at $4.99 and every other single payment at $5, tips included, because a string of tiny payments is how a stolen card list is tested.
• Cards, devices and email addresses behind a chargeback go on a block list, so the same card cannot come back on a new account. Several paying accounts on one device or address, and a buyer who shares a device, address or card with the creator whose content he buys, are flagged to a person; in the second case the creator's payouts wait for that decision.

8. When a dispute arrives anyway

• A pre-dispute alert from the card networks (Ethoca, Visa Rapid Dispute Resolution) is answered with an immediate refund and the end of the subscription, so the dispute is never filed. Such a refund ends access and takes back the creator's share like any other refund, and counts towards the account's refund limits.
• We answer every retrieval request and every chargeback within the processor's deadline with an evidence pack: the purchase and, for a card payment, its 3-D Secure result, the agreement to a renewal with its wording, time, IP address and device, the terms shown on the purchase screen that day, every reminder and receipt sent, the absence of any cancellation before the charge, every sign-in and every opened item afterwards, and earlier undisputed purchases matched on account, IP address and device as Visa Compelling Evidence 3.0 asks.
• An account behind a chargeback is closed the way a suspension closes it, its subscriptions stop, and its cards and devices go on the block list. It can ask to be reopened through appeals.
• The creator's remuneration for a disputed sale is cancelled, and what was already credited to her is recovered from a reserve held for that purpose, so a chargeback is never paid for by other creators.
• We measure the dispute ratio daily, the way Visa's monitoring programme counts it, and act well before any network threshold; we report it on whatever schedule a processor sets, including in months when there is nothing to report.

9. Content that should never have been there

Intimate material published without consent is removed within 48 hours of a valid notice, and in practice the same day. Suspected illegal material is removed immediately and reported. Reports are taken from anybody, with no account, at complaints and content removal, and any decision of ours can be contested at appeals.