Episode 6: Knocking on the Door of a Porn Empire

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Welcome back.

Here's your reminder.

This is a series about power and money in the porn industry.

Some parts of this series are very much for adults.

We should warn you that this episode contains very graphic depictions of a type of pornography that some people might find upsetting.

In our last episode, we told you all about the way MindGeek came up against a wall of reckoning, the giant of online porn.

The company that has dominated this industry more than any other, was finally cut down to size.

It was cut down by two of the most everyday businesses you could imagine, Visa and MasterCard, huge payments companies that seem to moonlight as the regulators of world porn.

But here's the puzzle for this episode.

While MindGeek took down millions of videos, its biggest rival seemed untouched by the whole affair.

This other company serves more porn to more people in the world today than MindGeek ever did.

Not only that, it makes MindGeek look like a beacon of transparency.

Just listen to its extraordinarily forgettable name, WGCZ.

It stands for Web Group Czech Republic.

You know, because it's a web group in the Czech Republic.

WGCZ's tube sites, XVideos and XNXX, host about 6 billion visits a month.

That's roughly the same as Twitter, and much more than MindGeek's flagship site, Pornhub.

But you're probably hearing about WGCZ, the owner of all those popular sites, for the first time.

We've discovered that in the pornography world, the competition between the two companies, MindGeek and WGCZ, is fierce.

They are like rival clans, the Montagues and Capulets of porn.

Day by day, they fight to dominate the industry, mostly for money, sometimes just out of spite.

And despite having similar origins, these two powerful porn empires have taken very different paths.

They both started out as pirates, but there is a time when the pirate ship comes into port and starts to improve the island that it's ported at and it ceases to be the pirate.

Mind geeks ceased to be the pirate a long time ago.

They're a very different kind of company.

This is Kelly Holland.

She knows this story well.

She was there when the tube sites first took a swing at the foundations of the porn industry.

If you go to Montreal, they've got a

seven or eight story building right on the freeway with their name plastered on the side and they've got huge departments.

I mean, mean, they're running like any large corporation.

WGCZ is running out of a

throwback Soviet block apartment building in Prague.

And the neighbors complained because they were shooting porno in an apartment on the second floor, and the neighbors could hear it.

I mean, they're still operating as if they were a shadow company.

While Visa and MasterCard came down hard on MindGeek for failing to police content, WGCZ somehow dodged that bullet.

If anything, this little-known Czech company has been the winner in the war on MindGeek.

This is the story of why it pays to stay hidden.

if you're in the business of porn.

I'm Patricia Nilsson.

He's Alex Barker.

From Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, this is hot money.

Act one.

WG Who?

We're in the dusty hills of the San Fernando Valley, in the northwest outskirts of LA.

Kelly Holland is an old-school feminist, and that's actually what drew her to make porn in the first place.

For her, back in the 90s, porn was a way to stick it to traditional American values that she found stifling.

What became apparent to me fairly early on was, A, it was a renegade culture.

It was a radical culture.

It was very disruptive.

Long story short, Kelly wanted in.

First, she made a documentary about porn.

Bruce Springsteen had just come out with Born in the USA, I think, so we decided we would call it Porn in the USA.

And that's how it started.

She then went on to shoot the real thing.

Eventually, she became one of the industry's first big female directors.

Well, things don't always work out like they should.

Well, here's Michael now.

I got the sink working upstairs and the hall closet behind the clothes.

Well, that's great.

She made such a strong name for herself that in 2006, she was headhunted by one of the most iconic brands in porn, Penthouse.

At that point, tube sites were just getting started.

And as they ripped through the adult industry, Kelly kept rising through the ranks of Penthouse.

When her boss decided to leave, he asked Kelly to fill his shoes.

He said, well, I'll put it to you this way, Holland.

You're not an easy person to get along with.

So if I have to hire somebody to be president of Penthouse, they're probably not going to like you.

And if they want to fire you, I'm not going to get in their way because I respect verticals.

So what's your answer?

And I went, gosh, I guess put like that.

That's how I actually became president.

But as a business leader, Kelly faced new challenges.

As her old boss had predicted, she soon started clashing with the CEO of Penthouse.

To get rid of him, Kelly saw only one solution.

She had to take over the whole thing.

Kelly succeeded, sort of.

She took over Pent House in 2016, but only with the help of what she jokingly called street corner gangster debt at a 23% interest rate.

Thing is, Kelly didn't get on with the lenders either.

The business struggled, and by 2018, just two years after she took over, she filed for bankruptcy.

Penthouse was once again for sale.

So a bankruptcy auction is is not like a Christie's auction where you get that very subtle nod or you get the finger up or the placard comes up.

The courtroom was packed.

It was already hot in Los Angeles and I think people were sweating a little bit.

Kelly remembers standing at the back, too nervous to sit down.

The clown section had to be shaken out first, and then it came down to the serious bidders, and that was very clearly MindGeek and WGCZ.

MindGeek, of course I knew and I knew them all the way back into the Manwin times because they were so relevant in driving the changes in business and they were very relevant in affecting my broadcast.

I didn't know anything about WGCZ.

It took me a day just to remember the four letters.

Wait, W what?

WGCZ

or WGCZ,

a corporate brand so anonymous that it hides in in plain sight.

Remember, it owns X-Videos, the world's most highly trafficked porn site by some distance.

It has about 1 billion more visits a month than Pornhub today.

At the auction that day, WGCZ's representative was Robert Seifert.

Kelly remembers that Robert wore baggy jeans and a t-shirt with holes.

He stood out among all the suits.

And he was trying to become her new boss.

Kelly asked a colleague about him.

I said, who is that?

And they said, X-Videos.

I said, what?

He said, well, you know, we went over the numbers with him.

He doesn't know anything about the company.

He doesn't know anything about the numbers.

The courtroom was tense and quiet.

This battle was about more than the fate of Penthouse.

It was a bare-knuckle fight for pride between the two heavyweights of the porn industry.

It was very obvious that MindGeek and WGC were going to bid against each other.

It was, who's got the largest penis here kind of thing.

And they hate each other.

So it was all about that.

So

they were bidding against each other.

And I don't know why I felt that WGCZ in that moment was a better choice than MindGeek.

In retrospect, I was dead wrong.

But I was on a dead wrong running streak at that point because, you know, every choice I'd made that year had been wrong.

The bidding continued.

Robert Seifert for WGCZ and a guy named Scott Justice for MindGeek.

He would say, here representing MindGeek, MindGeek bids, 9 million.

Sit back down.

Seifert slouching in the corner.

WGCZ,

9.2.

The judge would say, what?

9.2, WGCZ.

I'm sorry, could you say, what is the company again?

I just remember.

He had to ask 12 times.

And Robert was very quiet.

He's like, WGCZ bids 9.8.

I'm sorry, what was that bid?

Then Scott, Scott's a big guy, booming voice.

Mine geek bids 9.9.

WGCZ bids 10 million.

You know, it was just back and forth and back and forth.

So it was a bit theatrical, you know.

So then the bidding continues.

Bid it up to 11.

Then Siefert piped up.

11.2, and they asked for other bids, and that was it.

11.2, bam!

Penthouse was sold to a company that Kelly knew nothing about.

Kelly assumed that she and Robert would spend loads of time together, at least over the next few days.

But

he had other plans.

The next thing I remember him saying was that he had to get back on a plane because he had a dentist's appointment in Prague.

And I said,

you just bought Penthouse.

You bought one of the most iconic adult brands in the world.

And you're going to go to a dental appointment?

I think you need to reset that, don't you?

Kelly later discovered that Robert had bid for her company on a whim.

The story goes that Robert heard that Penthouse was up for sale at a Friday night dinner party.

He had jumped on a plane to LA and by Monday, Robert had bought Penthouse.

The whole thing took less than 72 hours.

Kelly says he barely knew anything about the company's finances.

It seemed he just wanted to own it.

We had a lunch the next day to introduce him to everybody, to introduce him to the staff.

I actually at that point felt comfortable with him for two reasons.

I understood that he didn't know anything about the company.

And I had a wrong presumption that he would be wise enough to allow the people who did understand what was happening to do their job.

It didn't work out that way.

Penthouse was broke.

It had bills and wages to pay.

But getting funds from Robert proved tricky.

And the first, oh my God, moment was when Robert Seyford said, I don't understand this.

Why do I have to pay any money?

I already paid 11.2 million.

But that point had to be explained over and over and over again.

Now look, Kelly had run penthouse into bankruptcy and we're not making a judgment here on who was right or wrong.

But while Kelly was trying to get on the same page with Robert, she was hearing things about WGCZ

that really made her nervous.

She started to suspect that Robert wasn't actually in charge.

It's not like he has access to the money of the company.

He's a very small part of this.

Kelly learned there was somebody else behind Robert who was in control.

The deeper I got into it, the more concerned I became about just the general level of secrecy around the company.

That line about, you know, the money has to move sometimes from a personal account, sometimes from a business account, sometimes through multiple accounts.

That sounded a bit sketchy to me.

And here we are, right back where we started.

You might remember this take from Kelly.

It was the very first thing you heard at the beginning of our series.

If you play that fast and loose in that environment, I have to assume that you're playing that fast and loose in every environment, and that you're not concerned about all the regulations that underpin our world and his world in Europe and the integration of those two worlds.

It was a volatile situation that turned worse.

Kelly was fired in 2018.

Her run at Penthouse was over.

And the people she thinks made the decisions about her future and the future of Penthouse, she never met them.

All she knew was their names.

The Pacos.

That's Stefan Paco and his twin sister Mallory, to be exact.

The twins behind the world's most popular porn sites.

More about them when we return.

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With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

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Learn more at supermobile.com.

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Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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There's more food for thought, more thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

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Act two: the Prague HQ

We've met some mysterious characters in the world of porn,

but the Pacos,

they really topped the bill.

They are the owners of WGCZ, and Stefan runs the business day to day.

Now,

one thing they do have in common with the owner of their biggest rival is

You might easily believe they don't exist.

They are registered as the owners of WGCZ,

but there is hardly any trace of them on social media.

No pictures.

They send out guys like Robert Seaford to do their business in public.

There is even some speculation online as to whether the twins are actually...

made up.

A front for someone else.

Well...

They're not.

Mallory handled the corporate side.

Stéphane is the computer whiz.

He loves gaming.

They come from a small town in a region of eastern France, known for its coal mines and its burgundy wine.

They still rely on friends and family from there to run their business.

Stéphane is the one who really blazed her path into porn and who is ultimately, we learned, in control of the company.

He was running online porn picture galleries back in 2002.

He was in his early 20s at the time, a skinny redhead.

But 20 years on,

he is the master of more internet porn traffic than any other man on Earth.

And

no one really knows anything about him.

Not even people in the industry.

Again, a question I've asked so many times over the past year.

How is this possible?

I remember looking up the address of their headquarters on Google Maps and it wasn't quite the Soviet department block that Kelly Holland described, but it did look a lot like the entrance was down a back alley.

I couldn't believe one of the world's top 10 websites was being run out of this building.

It just didn't make sense.

And so I hopped on a plane with our producer, Pete Sale.

Okay, we're recording.

So yeah, just tell me a bit about where we are and why we're coming.

We arrived in Prague yesterday and we sat down this morning to have a coffee and we know that WGCZ is based here in Prague and we just wanted to go and look at their headquarters and looked it up on Google Maps and it turns out that it's just next door to our hotel and we actually passed it yesterday when we were going for dinner and missed it.

We walked by the headquarters of what's possibly the world's biggest porn company and we didn't even notice.

It was a shared building with an open entrance.

There were company signs plastered on the wall, like for a Croatian tourist bureau.

But most of them were names of WTCZ subsidiaries.

So

this was the right spot.

I did try calling them.

I did try finding a press office, but I didn't have any luck.

And so I decided to walk in and see if I could find anyone to speak to.

There was no security, no reception, nothing stopping me from walking in.

Just a property manager who took a while to realize I may not be their usual type of visitor.

So what happened?

So this very lovely man who was getting very nervous about us standing around and recording here, he chased me up the stairs.

But because he's quite much older than me, I did manage to find one floor that had a WGCZ

sign on it.

And I knocked on a door and a man came out and looked quite confused as to why I was there.

And I told him I'm a journalist and I'm trying to reach out to their press office.

And he said, I don't think we have one.

I asked, can I speak to you?

He said, no.

And, you know, I said, is there, do you have any advice for me?

What should I do?

And he said, I don't know.

And I walked upstairs as well.

And to the great dismay of the property manager, who had by that time caught up with me,

I went to knock on some of the doors on the other side.

And these two young women opened the door.

I mean, it was kind of strange because the door was already open, you know, it wasn't locked.

So I knocked on the door and they said, you know, we have nothing to do with the business.

Looking back, it was the women that stuck in my mind.

They were young, blonde, thin, and seemed nervous to see me there.

I'm not sure who they were exactly.

Several people have since told me that one of WGCZ's production studios is based in that building.

They actually shoot porn in their headquarters.

And this studio, it produces the kind of stuff that anti-porn campaigners want banned.

A lot of it is rough and degrading.

And that's not just my take, it's the whole point of it.

It's humiliation porn.

The videos shot here are at the hardest edge of the industry.

The physical extreme.

The kind of stuff some performers told me crosses the line for them.

Paco Studio isn't the only one making this kind of porn, but it is the biggest name in the genre.

His subscription site called Analvids is the go-to destination for people looking for these kinds of videos.

Analvid members pay roughly $30 a month for the basic plan, and they pay with MasterCard and Visa credit cards.

How?

Well, technically, humiliation porn isn't banned under Visa and MasterCard's core rules.

You know, all those commandments we told you about in the last episode.

But the banks and billers they work with, the ones who actually process payments for Visa and MasterCard, they often take a more conservative view.

They say no to some of the acts you'll find on Paco's site.

They don't allow it because they think it will harm their reputation, or rather that of Visa and MasterCard.

But Paco, he has found some way to make the business work.

And it's not just the paywall sites.

Paco's tube sites also host content with the least amount of restrictions in the industry.

That's according to what we've seen, what sources have told us, and a spreadsheet, a porn spreadsheet, to be exact, made by a performer called Sophie Ladder.

She meticulously charts the acts and words that might get you kicked off adult platforms.

Many top sites are covered with boxes highlighted in red.

No menstrual blood, no kidnapping roleplay, no hypnosis.

The platforms that stand out as mostly green,

they are owned by Stefan Paco.

Vomit?

That's okay.

Swallowing urine?

Fine.

Blood?

No problems.

The whole thing confused us.

Performers like Stoya have told us how tricky it can be to navigate complicated rules on porn set by financial institutions.

But Paco's empire seems to stay on the right side of Visa and MasterCard, while hosting and making some of the most extreme content.

This industry in general seems to have a lot of backstories that if you are not aware, you are in deep shit.

You just don't get some bookings.

This is Sabian Demonia.

She's a porn performer who has worked for Paco Studios, including the one at his headquarters.

Many people in the industry shy away from speaking publicly about their experiences.

There's a lot at stake for them.

If you get on the wrong side of the people in charge, it can be hard to get work.

But Sabian,

she agreed to talk with me on the record.

Sabian is covered in tattoos all the way up to her neck.

And even though her body art brands her as so-called alternative, meaning it's not always easy to get cast, she's quickly become quite a big name.

Don't let me ask twice.

I've been good girl.

Oh yeah, come on.

So how did you become so big?

Because that's what everyone's saying.

Everyone's like, she just kind of suddenly came in and now you're everywhere, you're involved in everything.

So like,

I mean, I don't, I don't really know.

I guess we're working our asses off.

Sabion was a glamour model for years, mainly as a hobby.

But then she realized that the fantasy woman she was cosplaying could actually make her quite a bit of money.

So for the past three years, Sabion's been a full-time porn star.

In that time, she's worked with loads of studios, including Paco's.

If you talk to people in the industry about his studios, they tend to refer to them by an old umbrella name, Legal Porno.

And that work brought her lots of attention.

I did my two first scenes and my following went crazy just because I was on Legal Porno.

Sabian says that the studio operating in Paco's headquarters pays well.

because of the physical and mental strain that performers are put under.

She described what it was like to shoot for the studio.

We have chosen to include it because we don't want to gloss over the fact that the porn industry asks a lot of performers.

When I speak to people inside the industry, everyone's saying like, no one wants to do that stuff.

Like, it's like the perverts outside of the industry who want this and we need to supply it.

I've spoken to people who just like, say, like, you know what, keep your money.

Like, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna finish, you know, the shoot here.

people are unfortunately facing the situation they have to work on demand supply situation let's be honest porn as a thing

supposed to supply you with the best way of expressing your sexual desires and human beings are known for having weird kinky sometimes super deprave fantasies.

I did this and for me it's just gay porn with backup dancer.

Period.

Sabian says she thinks there's a demand for this kind of porn from viewers who just want to see women degraded.

That's it.

The girl never had it.

Let's see how quickly we'll make her cry.

I should point out, Sabian is one of many performers who have chosen to perform this kind of porn.

She knew exactly what she was getting into.

She actually did some in-depth research, watching hours of content on Paco's site.

But the industry is full of very young people, especially in Prague, which is one of Europe's porn production hubs.

Many performers come from countries like Ukraine and Russia and don't speak Czech or English.

And more importantly, they don't have rights to work in EU countries, which makes them more dependent on whoever helped them get the gig in the first place.

The point is, it's hard to imagine that everybody can do or does as much research as Sabian did going into it.

Another quick warning here.

Sabian is about to describe in explicit terms some of the things she experienced shooting for Paco Studios.

We can blame them for many things, but

I don't think any of people who broke on the scene stand on front of the mirror and be like, tomorrow they will piss on me, they will fuck me hard, my ass will be sore, you know, how can I avoid breaking internally?

How I will feel about myself after that all happened.

Even though Sabian says shooting for Paco's studio put her body in danger, she doesn't think the making of this kind of porn should be illegal.

She sees it as a matter of choice.

In this series, we haven't sought to expose illegal practices on porn sets.

We've looked at the porn business within the rules.

But even if Paco's Studios follow the rules set by the financial institutions that oil the wheels of the porn industry, it's clear that the kind of porn he makes and sells is high risk.

A level of risk that is simply too much for many banks, payment processors, and other pornographers.

As we heard in the last episode, this content carries exactly the sort of reputational risk that payment companies want to avoid.

I did ask Sabian about Paco.

She had met him, but she did have something to say about him.

Obviously, it's not fair that the person who gets the least shame

get the most money.

But, you know, life is life.

It is how it is.

I mean, come on.

Is politics fair?

No.

There are so many other industries where the top guys, you will never know their names.

I mean, I agree with you that it's true that like in any industry there are private companies, you don't know who owns the company, so on.

But I feel like with porn, it's there's this slight difference.

You know, performers, you don't have the right to take down content.

Once you're out there, you're out there, right?

And as a performer, you face a lot of stigma.

Back in the days, you'd have like Larry Flint and Hugh Hefner, and people were making shitloads of money, but they went out there and defended the industry.

I think Stefano is just a businessman, and businessmen like to keep quiet about their money.

Where other people who do it for their ego will flash everywhere what they do.

So let's not make James Bond out of Stefano, he's just very good in business making I guess.

That's why he keeps his privacy as a priority.

Maybe Stefan Paco is not quite your secret agent but he seems to have a special license in this business.

He can make and distribute some of the most fringe porn on the internet and still get paid for it.

Could staying below the radar be the key to how he does this?

Before I left Prague, I found someone who helped us understand what really makes Paco stand out from his rivals.

That's after the break.

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With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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Act three:

why it pays to stay low.

So,

you found a whistleblower?

I mean, people are so reluctant to talk about Paco's empire that when we finally found someone from the inside who would talk, it certainly felt like a whistleblower.

We recorded an interview, but I can't use his name.

I can't play his voice.

He's too worried about recriminations for that.

I can tell you though, about his experiences working for the Paco twins and WGCZ.

And does he know the place well?

Yeah, definitely.

I mean well enough to understand the relationship between twins.

Apparently they're not always on great terms.

Mallory used to handle the books, and some staff feared her.

But she has stepped back from the company in recent years.

Stefan is the one who really calls the shots.

Apparently he micromanages things.

Our insider called him a megalomaniac, the master of puppets.

He has a company for everything.

It's a really complex empire split into small cells for each business, and he sits in the middle of it all.

Sounds like he's pretty headstrong, self-reliant kind of guy.

And that's the key word, self-reliant.

This guy I spoke to mentioned something crucial about Paco's business that I missed at first.

It wasn't until months after our conversation that the light bulb moment finally came.

He told me that Paco had built his own payment processor.

You know, those companies at the bottom of the Visa and MasterCard ecosystem that write detailed rules on what type of porn is allowed.

Well, that's one way to gain real independence.

You still need a bank, but it just gives you much more operating freedom, especially on content that might be banned by other sites.

Exactly.

This is how we can run some of the most permissive porn sites on the internet and still make money.

The payment processor.

Some other porn companies have their own payment processor, but few rely so heavily on them.

It allows Paco to make a direct link between subscribers who pay for his porn and his bank.

Because he owns the payment processor, he needs to rely on fewer financial companies.

He essentially cut them and their regulations out.

To differentiate yourself now, you've got to do something different, edgy.

I mean, you know, keep it legal, but it's got to be different.

This is Kevin Smith.

He's a payments consultant and has been in the industry for close to three decades, specialising in risk management.

My question was, how big a deal is it that Paco has his own payment processor?

It gives them extra flexibility on that particular content.

It means that if they have to make some dramatic decisions to pull or change, it doesn't affect other parts of the business.

It primarily just gives them more control.

Control.

Independence.

The very things that appeal to a man like Stefan Paco.

Kevin said setting up a payment processor is not easy.

It's a tech challenge.

There is lots of data regulation.

Most companies think it's better to just pay someone to handle that.

But being independent does have benefits, especially if you want to set your own rules.

If you want to decide what porn is acceptable to make and what is acceptable to sell.

At the end of the day, you look at it and go, the Visa MasterCard rules at the highest level basically say keep it legal.

in the jurisdiction of the seller and the buyer.

For adult, it has the extra flavor of said keep it legal and none of the following.

And then you're right, the rest of it is open to interpretation.

If it isn't any of the above, you have absolute flexibility.

Those words are still ringing in my head.

Absolute flexibility.

And Stefan had found a way to minimize the constraints, to escape through many restrictions faced by other porn sites.

We had spent six months trying to contact Stefan, phone, email.

Patricia visited his office.

And then, in a late-breaking surprise, WGCZ actually confirmed what we had suspected in writing.

It was incredible.

Right when we were about to lock this episode for release, we got a response from Paco's TubeSite XVideos, an email that explained the company's strategy and overall outlook on porn.

And what's so weird about that message is that it's unsigned, but written in the first person.

And it references a meeting that only Paco could have attended.

So it sounded to us like Paco wrote it himself.

It said, Hello, FT.

Here are some comments from us.

We're a little late.

Sorry.

And the most important point the email makes is this.

It basically says that Visa and MasterCard care most about stopping illegal sexual content, which is absolutely true.

The company, or PACO,

has realized that what prompts Visa and MasterCard to take action are videos made or distributed without the consent of the people in them.

And that's what they say their priority is, meeting the core MasterCard and Visa rules, not all the extras and detailed additional restrictions that banks and processes in the Visa and MasterCard networks might require.

The email said that as far as Paco's company is concerned, all porn made with consent is fine, including the type of humiliation porn that Sabian told us about.

And that, quote, efforts should be spent on fighting actual non-consensual content rather than consensual kinks and roleplays.

They'd love for all the payment intermediaries that ban certain types of porn to just

back off.

The email argues that lots of sites and social media platforms carry similar content to Paco, but that press and politicians keep, in their words, hammering away at the same two or three tube sites.

Their point is that while user-generated content has been transformative for mainstream media, it's been a disaster for porn.

To quote this email, today the adult industry is a giant mess.

People fight each other a lot.

You've got systematic industry-scale piracy, revenge porn, stolen content everywhere.

Paco controls about a third of all porn traffic, a third,

mainly through his free tube sites.

And yet, here he is saying he's not happy with how the industry has developed.

And this is the surprising part.

He went on to say that the industry could be fixed again by

politicians.

But only as long as they drop the bias against porn and, quote, talk to people who actually understand the industry and the internet.

Could one of the most secretive men in porn be calling for government intervention?

Stefan Paco has shown us that if you understand the payments world, if you do just enough to never upset MasterCard or Visa,

you can glide on.

So there he is, with this enormous growing empire and an anonymous entity at the top of it that hasn't been cracked down on by Visa or MasterCard.

Well, they haven't cracked down on it yet.

Next time on Hot Money, if the company behind X Videos taught us one thing,

It's that if you want to revolutionize porn, it's payments that you have to figure out.

And

it just so happens that a fresh wind of change is blowing through the world of porn.

Will tell you how a finance fetish helped make a groundbreaking site called OnlyFans,

and how uptight bankers almost chased it out of the porn industry.

I mean, for a lot of people, it was like being cut down at the knees.

Do you have regrets on how you handled it looking back?

Not on how it was handled.

I don't think we had much of a choice, but I deeply regret the amount of concern and anxiety it caused.

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

It was written and reported by me, Patricia Nilsson.

And me, Alex Barker.

Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer.

Edith Russillo is our associate producer.

Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Amanda K.

Wong is our engineer.

Music composition by Pascal Wise.

Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez-Cusado.

Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein.

Special thanks to Renee Kaplan and Rula Khalov at the Financial Times, and Mia Lobel, Lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries.

We had a lot of help for this episode from our external researcher, Wojciech Mihałak.

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Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.

This is an iHeart podcast.