After starting out in sex work in , Knox, like others in the field, has become something of a financial pariah. The first to ban her were the payment appsβPayPal, Venmo, and CashAppβwhich prohibit the sale of adult content as policy.
But then Knox lost her bank account too. It took a week to recover her money. But like Knox, she quickly ran into trouble. When word of her side hustle spread through the ward, Rae lost her job. Rae set up a company through which to manage her income, but no major bank would give her a business account. 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.
