Don’t Pay with Credit/Debit Cards!

Fraudsters

Extrapolated damage caused by credit-card fraud from 2021 through 2027; https://www.statista.com/statistics/1264329/value-fraudulent-card-transactions-worldwide/

By their very nature, credit and debit cards are extremely insecure means of paying. They allow worldwide frauds of more than 30 billion(!) dollars every year, and rising (see chart). Anyone knowing someone’s credit-card number and expiration date can take the owner’s money out of their account and run with it. The same is true with checks in the U.S. Anyone knowing someone else’s bank account number and routing number can make up a check and clean out that account. No system that allows just anyone to clean out someone else’s bank account that easily should be legal. All legal payments methods should be based on the principle that the payer has to initiate a payment (push payments). No unidentified person simply transmitting a few numbers displayed on a plastic card or on a check should ever be allowed to take out any money. In fact, considering the size of the fraud, credit and debit cards as well as checks should be ILLEGAL!

So why aren't they?

Profiteers

The reason for it is that too many people profit from it. In fact, a whole string of companies involved in processing credit-card payments make a living of skimming the turnover of vendors accepting credit-card payments: merchant-service providers accommodate the customer-care needs of merchants – and take their share of every payment; gateway-service providers have the hard- and software it takes to communicate payment information from the merchant-service providers to the bank – and take their share of every payment; and the brands issuing the cars – VISA; Master, AmEx, Discover etc. – for doing what exactly? – anyway, they, too, take their share of every payment. Within that chain of communication of your payment information from you to the bank, there are so many people who can potentially get their hands on your credit-card information that it is no wonder so much fraud occurs. In fact, some 15% of all the fraud that does occur happens by people who sit somewhere along that chain! But even if they don’t take what’s not theirs, considering that trillions of dollars get paid by plastic cards every year, and that some 2-3% of this is skimmed off by this chain of processing companies, go figure why this fraud-infested business is still legal: because too many people are making a comfortable living by skimming off all the rest of us!

Censors

There is another reason why you shouldn’t pay with a credit/debit card: every single one of these companies involved in processing your payments monitor what you buy, where you buy, from whom you buy. But more to the point, they closely monitor what we merchants sell. And if they don’t like the kind of books we offer, for example, they can simply pull the plug on the merchant, and instantly cripple his means of earning a living. Destroying businesses that the financial powers that be don’t like is very easy, because these companies know who is selling what to whom. We at CODOH and Castle Hill have our contracts with merchant-service providers, gateway-service providers and card issuers cancelled on a regular basis. They don’t like what we do, so they refuse to offer their services. This usually happens only after several months or a few years of normal business activities, and often after having been "enightened" as to our activities by some pressure group among the traditional enemies of free speech. During the past several years, we have had a merchant-service provider who mercilessly took advantage of our situation and demanded that we don’t just pay the usual 2-3% of each transaction to all the profiteers in this chain of fraud, but they actually insisted that they keep an additional 10% of all proceeds as a “security deposit”, because we are allegedly a high-risk business! The only financial risk we have ever encountered is being abused like that by CCard processing companies! It’s like a Mafia boss telling me I have to pay him 10% more of my business’s turnover for increased risks, because I operate my business in an area that is turned into a high-risk area due to the Mafia’s activities!

Hence, if you disagree that 12% of your credit-card payment ends up in those vulture’s throats, don’t use it!

Update November 2023: In late 2023, when the establishment's pro-Jewish frenzy in the U.S. reached fever pitch during Israel's genocide in Gaza, our Ccard processing service provider decided to pull the plug on us after all, because we allegedly threaten their reputation. Never mind that hardly anyone in the public space could name any credit-card processing provider, let alone had any way of finding out – or caring about – what their "reputation" is.

Alternative Payment Methods

In a sane and common-sense world of electronic interconnectedness, all it should take to make a payment is for the payer to tell their bank to wire a certain amount to the recipient’s bank, which could be done instantly, free of charge, securely and without anyone else knowing anything about what is going on, hence with no way of any dirty censorship NGO (SPLC, ADL, you name them…) ruining people’s financial lives. Actually, that option has been implemented in the European Markets for a while (Germany has had it for decades). So if you reside there, please resist the temptation of instant gratification by paying instantly with a credit card, and instead choose the option “Bank Transfer”. If you have a U.S. bank account, there is hope, too. A few years ago, U.S. banks created a new payment form that goes directly from account to account, with no intermediary, and it’s free of charge! It is called the “Zelle®” network. By now, most banks in the U.S. have joined that network designed to outcompete Paypal, VISA, MASTER, AmEx and the other fee skimmers. It allows any bank-account owner to register any of their email addresses with their bank, then send money instantly, free of charge, securely and anonymously to any other email address from within their online banking account. If that email address is registered by someone as a Zelle® email, the money will go into that person’s account instantly (the receiving bank will direct it there without the sending bank even knowing the account details). If this receiving email address is not registered with any bank as a Zelle® address, then the sending bank will send an email informing the recipient how the money can be retrieved anyway. Knowing someone’s Zelle® email address isn’t good for anything, as the Zelle® network uses this only to identify which bank an email address is registered with. It is not used to initiate any payment at all, hence won’t be of use to anyone. Every payment has to be initiated by the bank-account owner from their online-banking account. It is a pure “push” system. No one can ever take money from anyone this way. Every payment must be given (pushed) by the owner. Check the lists of banks participating in this program here: https://www.zellepay.com/.

Castle Hill Publishers has registered the email address Banned[email protected] as their Zelle® email address. We encourage everyone residing in the U.S. NOT to pay Castle-Hill orders with credit cards or checks anymore, but to place an order with the payment option “bank transfer (Zelle)”, then send the amount due through their online banking as a Zelle® payment to Banned[email protected]. Castle Hill receive a notification of this incoming payment within minutes at most. No one else will ever know that you paid, whom you paid, how much you paid, and what services you used to pay, and we will not know your bank info, nor will you know ours. The banks communicate between themselves in real time without exchanging bank account infos. The receiving(!) email address is used at the receiving bank to identify an account, and no one else needs to know anything! And no credit-card processing snakes-in-the-grass can skin us alive anymore! And no eternal enemy of free speech can ever bully anyone into ruining our business anymore!

Bingo! Game over for financial censorship!

For all those who do not have a bank account in the U.S., there are alternatives as well. International payment services such as Western Union, Wise or World Remit usually allow payments into our bank account at reasonable fees or even free of charge.

To learn more about the various options to pay CODOH and/or Castle Hill, please see Castle Hill's payment options described here, and CODOH's donation options described here (scroll down to read the various possible donation methods).

Updated on Nov. 12, 2023