Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
Keep in mind that this is about chargeback risk, not implementing some secret government policy. "Anonymizing VPNs" are a high risk service -- the people signing up for them are more often "bad guys" than tech professionals looking for privacy -- and they're signing up with stolen payment information. There are far more hackers, crackers, carders, "script kiddies", spammers and other people that need to hide their location or appear to be connecting from a different country than there are IT professionals interested in paying for extra privacy.<p>Adult sites, online pharmacies, ticket brokers are treated the same way, and that has nothing to do with evading the NSA. MasterCard added all internet services (the MCC -- merchant category code -- that covers ISPs) to a high risk tier earlier in the year; I got the letter from First Data in the mail myself.