Here at Asian Sirens our main focus is of course Asian models, and all things related to that. There is one aspect of this we haven’t yet discussed, however: in order to access a lot of the internet content relating to these models, we have to pay for it. And that means dealing with a payment processor. Perhaps the most widely used payment processor on the net (at least in the US) is CCBill. Unfortunately however, I have just found out the hard way that they are a far from ethical company to deal with.
In short, I recently joined a web site that said they had something in their members section that I wanted, when in reality they did not. As I didn’t get what I paid for, I naturally contacted this web site and their payment processor, which was CCBill. As you can imagine, the web site never responded, but CCBill did – to their credit, quite promptly. However, their reponse was anything but helpful – let me quote what they wrote:Dear Customer,
CCBill.com does not own or operate the website in question and therefore does not control the content of the site. Since we do not control the content, we do not bill based on satisfaction of the content. You are billed based on availability to access the website. If you are unsatisfied with or have questions regarding the content, you will need to contact the site in question and report it to them. You can contact them through the contact information located on the site.
As you can see, they didn’t even bother to respond to me by name. This is because it is a canned response: they no doubt deal with thousands of these sorts of complaints in exactly the same way. Naturally I wasn’t happy with this, as I wasn’t simply dissatisfied with the content – the content they said they had didn’t exist! Hence, I didn’t get what I paid for – this web site was fraudulant, pure and simple. And I did try to contact the site anyway, but they simply didn’t respond, presumably safe in the knowledge CCBill wouldn’t do anything either.
After I pointed all this out to them, they sent me exactly the same response back! After a few more attempts to get them to actually respond to my complaint, they finally sent me the following email:
Dear Customer,
We have helped you as much as we can. You have been told many times that we will not issue a refund and you need to contact the site. Further e-mails about this matter will be ignored.
How rude is that? And I’m certainly not the only customer they’ve treated this way – check out the links below for a few more similar stories:
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff83600.htm
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff139276.htm
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff145787.htm
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff63199.htm
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff117616.htm
(this last one contrasts CCBill with PayCom, who do look after their customers)
The thing that really infuriates me about these people is not only that they refuse to help, but that they are unbelievably rude about it. And as you can see from the links above, they are this way with everyone who complains to them. If they said something along the lines of “I’m sorry sir, but unfortunately this is the policy of management” I wouldn’t be so pissed off, but they seem to treat their customers like they’re the enemy.
To make matters even worse, there are several other reports of people being falsely charged by CCBill, which they refused to do anything about either (their extraordinary rudeness is a common thread throughout these complaints too). Worse still, their credit card numbers were probably obtained as a result of the appalling security of CCBill’s cgi scripts – see these links:
www.theregister.co.uk/2001/12/28/porno_paymaster_ccbill_hacked_hard/
www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/03/ccbill_knew_of_credit_database/
www.securitytracker.com/alerts/2003/Jul/1007100.html
http://secunia.com/product/1824/
As regular readers will know I am also the webmaster of Sachiko McLean‘s site. I can confirm from my error logs that there are hundreds of attempts every day to hack into Sachiko’s site using well known CCBill exploits. But these don’t work, as we don’t use CCBill. In fairness, the vulnerabilities mentioned in the articles above have probably been fixed by now, but as these articles show it took them far too long to do it. They also demonstrate CCBill’s general lack of concern for the security of their customers.
On Sachiko’s site we use Verotel instead, who seem to have far fewer and less serious complaints about them than CCBill (and these mostly amount to stolen credit card numbers, which happens to everyone and which Verotel refunds anyway). I can also confirm that they make sure their clients do not fraudulantly misrepresent what they have in their members’ sections, as they regularly log into our members’ section to make sure we have what we say we have.
It’s companies like CCBill that have given the adult internet industry such a bad name, and have made it so expensive for small, honest independent adult sites (like Sachiko’s) to operate. A lot of the big adult site networks have basically come to rely on ripping people off to make a profit, and they depend on companies like CCBill to do it. This has made it become very expensive for adult sites to process credit cards, which hurts the small independent sites the most. If CCBill went out of business, a lot of dishonest and fraudulant adult sites would too.
Anyway, obviously the safest thing to do with regard to CCBill is simply to never join a site that only uses them as their payment processor. However, given the vast number of adult sites that use them this may not be an option for many of our readers. So if you’re interested in joining a site that is only processed by CCBill, you’d better make sure they will look after you if you experience any problems – because CCBill sure as hell won’t!
