“I just want to sell titty pictures,” says Allie Eve Knox, a professional dominatrix and fetish performer, exhausted. “I never wanted to be an expert in financial discrimination.”
After starting out in sex work in 2014, Knox, like others in the field, has become something of a financial pariah. The first to ban her were the payment apps—PayPal, Venmo, and CashApp—which prohibit the sale of adult content as policy. But then Knox lost her bank account too. It took a week to recover her money.
Nine years on and 30-plus bans later, Knox is jaded: “I don’t want to have to know how to run money to different places. I don’t want to deal with any of this bullshit.”
An ICU nurse by training, Allie Rae, another US-based sex worker, began posting on OnlyFans when her husband was furloughed. Before long, she was earning far more selling adult content online—close to $500,000 per month—than she was in her regular job. But like Knox, she quickly ran into trouble.
When word of her side hustle spread through the ward, Rae lost her job. But she also found that realtors wouldn’t deal with her, lenders refused her a mortgage, and accountants snubbed her. Rae set up a company through which to manage her income, but no major bank would give her a business account. “Left and right, it’s been a struggle,” she says. “I was very naive—I didn’t understand the magnitude of the discrimination.”
The experience of Knox and Rae is typical of sex workers across the globe, but particularly in the US, where banks and payment processors shy away from the adult industry. The reason is almost never made clear, but sex workers suspect that financial institutions fear reputational damage and liability for the facilitation of money laundering or sex trafficking. Data published in May by the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a US trade association for the adult industry, suggests two-thirds of sex workers have lost access to either a bank account or financial service, while 40 percent have had an account closed within the past year.
Faced with this predicament, sex workers have gone in search of an alternative means of both storing wealth and accepting payment. In cryptocurrency, for a time, it appeared they had found one: Not only did crypto allow clients to pay discreetly, without supplying personal information, but it gave sex workers a way to bypass the banking system entirely, by taking payments directly to their crypto wallets.
But as regulatory scrutiny of cryptocurrency ratchets up in response to the fallout of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, sex workers are bumping up against its limitations. They are finding that, in a few important ways, crypto is no more detached from the banking system than the dollar it was built to some day replace.
In the US, full-service sex work (also known as prostitution) is illegal in every state but Nevada, but pornography and online sex work are legal under the First Amendment. Irrespective of this distinction, banking access has been a problem for the entire sex work community since at least the 1960s, says Mike Stabile, director of public affairs at the FSC, and has only become more acute.
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