Both Visa and Mastercard have announced they have banned the use of their cards on Pornhub.

The decision came after an investigation found the existence of unlawful content on the porn website.

Mastercard said that its investigation over the past few days had confirmed violations of its standards prohibiting unlawful content on the Pornhub website.

In a statement the global payments business added “as a result, and in accordance with our policies, we instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance. In addition, we continue to investigate potential illegal content on other websites to take the appropriate action.”

Similarly, Visa said that given allegations of illegal activity, it would be suspending “Pornhub’s acceptance privileges pending the completion of [its] ongoing investigation.”

It said that it is currently instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek, the parent company of the porn site, to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network.

The well-known card provider added: “At Visa, we are vigilant in our efforts to stamp out illegal activity on our network, and we encourage our financial institution partners to regularly review their merchants’ compliance of our standards on this and other platforms.”

In response to the decision by both Visa and Mastercard to ban payments to the site, Pornhub said in a statement: "These actions are exceptionally disappointing, as they come just two days after Pornhub instituted the most far-reaching safeguards in user-generated platform history.

"Unverified users are now banned from uploading content -- a policy no other platform has put in place, including Facebook, which reported 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material over the last three years. In comparison, the Internet Watch Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub over the last three years.

"This news is crushing for the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on our platform for their livelihoods."

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