After a series of bans by payment providers, Joshua Conner Moon the owner of Kiwi Farms had created a website to hide the payment provider used to receive donations to his website. A number of concerns arose about the site, called lolcow.us, including breaches of numerous compliance rules. Impressively, this week their acquirer bank terminated them after receiving concerns I had sent to the card network, MasterCard. Furthermore, terminated merchants are automatically added to a blacklist that (depending on the reasons) can make it hard or impossible to find a new provider to receive card payments in future.
MasterCard have robust regulatory processes that respect the right to free speech whilst protecting the financial system from abuse.
Joshua Conner Moon, the owner of Kiwi Farms is an extreme embarrassment to the alt-right and to the causes he claims to support, such as “Free Speech”.
For some time Kiwi Farms has been moving from host to host and from payment provider to payment provider. A lot of work was done on this last year and in the end Joshua Moon created a bespoke donations website to hide his merchant bank / provider.
The intent was to prevent further terminations. For those opposed to Kiwi Farms the challenge has been to find a more permanent way to prevent Kiwi Farms simply moving on each time there is a problem.
When Moon set up lolcow.us he could have gone legitimate. There were some minor problems with the site but initially they would not have been apparent. True to form however, Moon failed to do so.
