MP slams prepaid credit cards in House of Commons

Labour MP Geraint Davies has presented a bill in the House of Commons demanding an end to anonymous prepaid credit cards and proposing fines for credit card companies whose products are used to purchase child abuse images.

In a bill presented under the Ten Minute Rule on the 21st of July Mr Davies told the House that since 2002 “credit card companies… have invested heavily to stop the use of conventional credit cards, but that particular horse has, of course, bolted. Few abusers would now risk their identities being known, so now they use prepaid cards instead."

However, when Mr Davies was asked what evidence there was showing that prepaid cards were being used in this way, he said his evidence was “anecdotal”.

“Anonymity breeds criminal behaviour”, he added.

Mastercard’s Mikael Svensson said his company had no evidence of an increased use of prepaid cards to purchase child abuse images.

“We don’t have the data that Mr Davies is suggesting”, he told us. “If somebody does have that data we’d be more than willing to do anything we can to shut them down”.

He said Mastercard constantly “crawls” the internet for abuse sites claiming to accept Mastercard. If any are found it contacts both the police and the bank in question, demanding that it stop the payment service.

“We’ve been doing this for a number of years”, he said “and we’ve seen the problem migrate away from traditional payment methods, such as credit cards, to alternative methods.”

In its most recent Strategic Overview report, the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP) noted an “apparent wholesale move by child sexual offenders to the use of peer-to-peer technology” for the distribution of child abuse images.

In a statement, Visa said that it too scoured the internet to find and close down sites selling child abuse material. It said its “position on the issue of child abuse is unequivocal - Visa Europe deplores the commercial exploitation of child abuse images and we do not allow Visa cards - debit, credit or prepaid - to be used to purchase child pornography.”

“This challenge is complex and constantly evolving, and we will continue to remain vigilant to ensure that we are doing everything we can to protect the exploitation of children online”, it said.

We asked Mr Davies to confirm that he had only “anecdotal” evidence suggesting that prepaid cards were being used to purchase child abuse material.

He said: “There is substantial, documented evidence, coming from several different sources, of prepaid cards being used illegally by persons under the age of 18 to buy goods online which they could not buy in the High Street … There is anecdotal evidence of these cards being used to facilitate other kinds of criminal behaviour, including the purchase if child pornography.

“The credit card companies were bang out of order to jump into this market without thinking it through, or if they did think it through for not caring enough to reach the right conclusions", he added.