Did Pornhub’s Owner MindGeek Just Pull off a Brazen Scheme To Avoid Getting Blacklisted by Visa and Mastercard?

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Pornhub’s shady owner, MindGeek, is not a stranger to controversy. After all, when a company is widely believed to have profited from sex trafficking and child abuse, notoriety becomes a de rigueur of sorts. However, MindGeek just might have outdone itself last week when it pulled off a very convenient sale to an obscure Canadian private company just ahead of Netflix’s highly anticipated exposé.

Let’s be honest here. It would be a herculean effort to find a person who has not heard of Pornhub, a veritable repository of carnally satisfying videos. What many people don’t know, however, is that Pornhub is simply one cog in a labyrinthine universe. Apart from Pornhub, MindGeek also owns websites such as Brazzers, YouPorn, Redtube, etc.

Before its recent sale, MindGeek was controlled by the banker Bernd Bergmair, with David Tassillo and Syrian-Canadian programmer Feras Antoon having joined the company back in 2008 to eventually become its CEO and COO, respectively. Tassillo and Antoon resigned from their high-profile roles at MindGeek in 2022 but retained their shares in the company.

Back in 2020, a New York Times op-ed accused Pornhub of hosting child porn. About six months later, 34 women publicly accused Pornhub of profiting from their trafficked videos, including instances of underage sex trafficking. These allegations then prompted Visa and Mastercard to cut off Pornhub from their network for a short while, with connectivity only restored once Pornhub implemented a wide-ranging purge of troublesome content.

Netflix has just released its new documentary, titled “Money Shot: the Pornhub