The financial system has decided that making a living online is suspicious. Creators are finding workarounds anyway.
Let’s talk about a very specific kind of humiliation: You’ve built a business. You pay your taxes. You have more followers than your bank has local branches. And then you walk into said bank, try to open an account, and get turned away like you showed up to prom in a trash bag.
This is the daily reality for tens of thousands of digital content creators — many of them women, many of them queer, almost all of them doing something entirely legal — who are being quietly, systematically locked out of basic financial services. No bank account. No business loan. No merchant processing. Just a polite “we’re unable to accommodate your needs at this time” and a door closing in your face.
Welcome to debanking. It’s real, it’s discriminatory, and the federal government is totally fine with it.
In late 2024, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency completed a review of the nine largest U.S. national banks, covering 2020 through 2023. What they found was about as damning as it gets: banks were using sector-wide restrictions instead of individual risk assessments, and final decisions were usually based on optics, media pressure, or political discomfort — not fraud or illegality.
“Reputation risk” was frequently cited as the reasoning behind denials and account closures, but without there being any safety-and-soundness basis behind the heightened scrutiny. Translation: banks weren’t turning creators away because they were doing anything wrong. They were turning them away because someone in compliance got squeamish.
The adult entertainment industry had a front-row seat. The OCC explicitly lists adult entertainment amongst restricted industries, alongside firearms, coal mining, payday lending, tobacco, crypto, and private prisons. Apparently, making content online is as financially radioactive as strip-mining Appalachia. Sure.
If you think this is only happening to small creators grinding out content from a ring-lit bedroom in the Midwest, think again. In early 2024, Keily Blair (the CEO of OnlyFans, a platform that generated $2.5 billion in revenue in 2022) revealed that a bank rejected her personal account application because of her job title. Her job title. At a billion-dollar company.
“Financial inclusion should be top of the agenda for everybody,” Blair said. “It really brings it home.”
And if the CEO of one of the most financially successful platforms on the internet can’t get a checking account, imagine what it looks like for the creators who actually built that platform from the ground up.
Banks are only part of the problem. The payment processor layer is its own special nightmare. American Express cards can’t be used on online pornography, Stripe won’t process adult content, and PayPal stopped supporting payouts for Pornhub in 2019. OnlyFans founder Tim Stokely made clear that his platform’s now-infamous 2021 near-ban on explicit content came in response to pressures from banking partners Bank of New York Mellon, Metro Bank, and JPMorgan Chase, who refused to service the site based on “reputational risks.”
One San Francisco-based creator, who goes by @Aella_Girl, put it plainly on social media at the time: “The real villains here are the payment processors, the silent shadowy blacklisting cabal that dictates the kind of moral behavior we’re allowed to engage in, who, without any sort of oversight, can wipe any company they wish out of existence.”
She’s not wrong. Visa and Mastercard, acting together, are currently a chokepoint for online payments — meaning every arbitrary policy of these two companies can translate into rules that all websites who want to process payments must follow. That’s an enormous amount of power to rest in the hands of companies that answer to no one in particular.
This isn’t equally distributed pain. Financial exclusion disproportionately affects women and racialized sex workers, as well as LGBTQI+ performers and creators. A 2023 survey by the U.S. Free Speech Coalition found that half of adult-entertainment respondents said financial discrimination was their biggest challenge, with 63 percent admitting that they had lost a bank account or payment provider, 50 percent had been denied a loan, and 39 percent had lost access to a credit card network.
These aren’t reckless people making bad financial decisions. These are small business owners being systematically kneecapped by institutions that have no legal basis for what they’re doing and who, until very recently, faced zero accountability for it.
Nobody is sitting around waiting for JPMorgan to develop a conscience. Creators have been building their own infrastructure.
Fintech companies like Wemlo, Fan-banking platforms, and neo-banks with fewer moral hangups have stepped into the gap. Cryptocurrency remains a lifeline for many, though it comes with its own volatility headaches. Some creators have formed LLCs in more creator-friendly states, run payments through business structures that obscure the underlying industry, or simply diversified across five or six different platforms and payment systems so no single debanking event can torch their entire income.
The savviest creators treat their financial setup the way a seasoned investor treats a portfolio: no single point of failure, always a backup, never trust the big guys to have your back
The financial system has spent years treating legal, tax-paying, self-employed creators like some kind of moral hazard while simultaneously processing payments for industries that actually cause measurable harm. The OCC’s findings didn’t change the law. But they changed the leverage. Creators now have federal receipts confirming what they always knew: they weren’t paranoid. They were being discriminated against.
That’s not nothing. In fact, in the slow, grinding world of financial regulation, it might be everything.
