“ThotAudit” trolls getting payment accounts canceled.

[davephx]

“ThotAudit” trolls getting payment accounts canceled.
The "that ho over there" campaign to report sexworkers to the IRS has quickly morphed into a battle over payments as trolls contact PayPal, Venmo and CirclePay to freeze their accounts.

Wired 11/30/2018 reports:
The tactic has far-reaching implications beyond adult entertainment. Foreign governments and other groups have abused the policies to silence opponents on platforms like Twitter and Facebook for years. Attacking through the payment processors is a new wrinkle on that approach.

When Lily Adams, an actor and model who sells access to her pornographic photos and videos, first noticed the ThotAudit movement gaining traction Saturday evening, she took to Twitter, calling it a witch hunt. Within one minute, a ThotAuditor flagged her account and tweeted that she had been added “to the review list for Monday morning.” By Monday, Adams’ PayPal account had been terminated. In an email to WIRED, Adams said that she had approximately $526 in her PayPal account at the time, and that the company told her it would hold the funds “indefinitely.”

"The feeling of being attacked from all corners is definitely frustrating," said Adams. By the end of the day, she had been banned from every cash app, and she wasn't alone. On Twitter, dozens of other sex workers experienced similar harassment and expressed outrage over being banned from multiple online payment service providers, including PayPal, Cash App, and Circle Pay. Many of the women claimed to have lost access to hundreds of dollars, as most payment companies absorb whatever funds were stored in the reported account.

Dave notes that I experienced this years ago with a Liberated Christians paypal account that was closed with fund in it when someone reported our swing/ polyamory content of libchrist.com. Paypal has strict restrictions against adult materials. I have also had reports of escorts accounts being frozen. In my case the funds were frozen for six months and then released.

The thot auditing field guide lists tens of thousands of potential sex work targets according to Wired - with detailed instructions for getting sexworkers banned from PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Amazon Pay, Stripe, Circle Pay, Snapchat, and Kik.

In the attacks by incels and their allies, activists on Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan have created automated programs to streamline the process of identifying, reporting, and harassing their targets. One program, called the ThotBot, includes the profiles of more than 20,000 alleged sex workers from several social media platforms that include a link to a PayPal account. “Search for bios with paypal in it, if they get banned paypal takes ownership of all the money on the account and it inevitably will be taxed as well,” the creator of the tool wrote in a tweet. In a later message, he claimed that one user of his program reported more than 100 profiles to PayPal.

In a direct message to WIRED, the creator of this ThotBot said the program aims for the “total excommunication or extermination of whores in society,” adding that he wants them to face the death penalty.

r/ThotAudit, which described itself as a community for “Right Wing Tax Squads,” had nearly 2,000 subscribers before it was banned Tuesday evening. In a statement to WIRED, a Reddit spokesperson said the subreddit had been banned for violating Reddit’s policies prohibiting content that “threatens, harasses, or bullies, or encourages others to do so.” In a sign of how extreme the group’s tactics are, 4chan, the anything-goes forum infamous for being a hotbed of depravity and toxicity, also banned numerous threads created by self-proclaimed members of the Right Wing Tax Squad.

Many of the harassment campaign’s biggest supporters have long complained of being censored by social media platforms and internet infrastructure companies. On Twitter, incels.is, a large online forum for incels, has championed efforts to have sex workers banned from several platforms. The MGTOW community—a more extreme offshoot of the incel movement whose adherents consider women subhuman—has been in turmoil for two weeks after YouTube banned ads on many MGTOW-related videos and channels, cutting off those users’ revenue streams. Yet many members of the movement helped instigate the ThotAudit.

Rose, a dominatrix who was targeted by the ThotAudit harassment campaign, says digital payment companies like PayPal have long had rules in place prohibiting sex-work-related transactions and frequently suspend the accounts of sex workers whenever it is made aware of their existence. Financial domination is a fetish where the submissive sends gifts—in this case, cash via online payment—to the dominant partner. In a message to WIRED, Rose said many men threatened to report her to PayPal on Tuesday, but she had already been banned by PayPal for using it for sex-work-related transactions.

Organizers of the campaign against sex workers continue to refine their tactics. As of Wednesday evening, much of the discussion among harassers on platforms like Twitter centered around streamlining reports to payment services providers like Cash App, PayPal, and Venmo. In one thread on the subject, an active member of the ThotAudit campaign detailed tactics he said would expedite the reporting process, including spamming webforms with multiple reports, including links to illustrate the breach of the company’s terms of service, and threatening to report the breach to the media if the company did not immediately ban the sex worker.