Online

High-tech Pornography and Gambling E-payment site Emerges

By: Justin Bourne

Posted: 07/13/2007

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Twenty-seven-year-old Rafael Diaz-Tushman, founder and chief executive officer of Pmints, wanted to offer merchants and consumers a substitute to services like PayPal — which does not allow secure transactions with companies that peddle digital pornography or facilitate online gambling within the U.S. Pmints intends to bring the proven e-wallet model to the adult industry to help protect against problems like chargebacks and fraud.

Diaz-Tushman told AVNOnline.com, “Some of our other, and in some cases, most important differences with our competitors will be revealed after our launch later this year. I do not want to reveal them right now for fear of losing competitive edge.”

Merchants and consumers interested in online gambling, or buying and selling adult-related materials need only open a Pmints e-wallet account in order to make safe, simple online transactions. All users will be able to fund their accounts through traditional financial sources — such as credit/debit cards and bank accounts — then transfer those uploaded monies to any recipient with a verified e-mail address.

“The major benefit of the Pmints e-wallet is the security and privacy it provides its users, who will have fewer restrictions on the services and materials they want to purchase or sell,” Diaz-Tushman continued.

The opening of an account and sending of money through a Pmints e-wallet account will be free. The basic package involves a per-transaction fee for monies received, and that per-transaction fee will scale accordingly based on a merchant evaluation made by Pmints. In the case of merchants in the adult industry, this evaluation will involve, among other things, the merchant’s status with the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection.

Diaz-Tushman attended Columbia University in New York City for his undergraduate studies and now is preparing for his master’s in business at the Darden School of Business Administration at the UniversityVirginia. of

“I am a serial entrepreneur, and my most relevant experience was with the Netflix competitor where I started in 2003, a year after graduating from Columbia,” Diaz-Tushman explained. “We carried videogames and adult DVDs in addition to mainstream DVDs, which differentiated us from Netflix at the time, and we used PayPal to accept payments online. PayPal froze my account and disabled incoming payments when they reviewed my site and found that we carried adult DVDs. I searched for an alternative e-wallet company that would allow a client merchant to work in the adult industry but found nothing. So I decided to get my MBA, meet other interested managers, and start Pmints.”

Diaz-Tushman elucidated that Pmints will be targeting 21- to 35-year-old males because of the significant overlap in their use of the Internet for shopping in the adult and mainstream industries, as well as their established and ever-growing interest in online gambling.

“Nothing in particular drew me to these industries — in reality, I have no problem with them,” Diaz-Tushman said. “In my opinion, tobacco, candy, firearm, and soft-drink companies do more harm to society than gambling and adult companies do. I wish these other companies received the same level of scrutiny as adult and gambling.”

Pmints intends to give Web users more than just secure online purchases for gambling or porn in the future. It also plans to aid dealings with conventional merchants, including clothing retailers and consumer-electronics sellers.