Mastercard recently made headlines by ending their illegal blockade against Wikileaks, the website that publishes state secrets such as the Afghan War Logs, Cablegate (250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic Cables) and Global Intelligence Files.
Unfortunately it was not all good news from the likes of MC and VISA because they apparently began blocking payments to VPN providers, taking a similar stance as they have done with file-sharing services. Currently the only example is the Swedish payment service provider Payson that sent an email to their customers stating “they cannot accept Mastercard or Visa payments any more due to a recent policy change by the companies,” a claim Visa immediately denied. According to the article on finextra the problem might have been caused by Payerson’s acquiring bank rather MC or Visa.
MC and Visa certainly aren’t the bastion of free speech, neither are PayPal of Bank of America, and it is conceivable that they initiated such steps and then lied about them. However, at this time we haven’t heard about any other VPN providers citing problems processing MC or Visa payments for their customers, making me question the validity of such claims.
We’ll keep following the story and will update this post when new facts become available.
Image Credit: The Consumerist
