Visa re-blocks credit card donations to WikiLeaks

The unblocking of credit-card donations to whistleblower site WikiLeaks lasted for only a few hours on Friday, after which Visa again shut down its payment gateway to the site. IDG quoted Visa representative Amanda Kamin as saying the credit-card firm suspended payment acceptance after learning an acquirer was accepting payments. “An acquirer briefly accepted payments on a merchant site linked to WikiLeaks. As soon as this came to our attention, action was taken with the suspension of Visa payment acceptance to the site remaining in place," she said. DataCell CEO Andreas Fink said his company had been accepting thousands of donations to WikiLeaks before running into problems around 3:30am Iceland time. Earlier, DataCell —which processed donations to WikiLeaks— had found a new payment acquirer, Valitor, that willing to process payments to WikiLeaks. Fink had thought the latest glitch was due to “automated" blocking because of the high amount of donations. “What’s more likely is the scenario that we run into some automated blocking due to the unexpected high amount of transactions within a short time while before we only had a few test transactions," he said before Kamin explained Visa’s action. IDG said this was the second time in seven months that Visa has stopped DataCell from accepting donations for WikiLeaks, which gained controversy for posting secret US diplomatic cables. For some hours Friday (Manila time), payments via MasterCard and Visa were again being accepted and processed for WikiLeaks. DataCell said the gateway for payments via Visa and MasterCard appeared to have been opened. Since Dec. 7 last year, DataCell said it had not been able to process Visa and Mastercard payments or payments by other international credit cards for WikiLeaks. It said its payment gateway was closed at the time by Teller A/S, the company providing the payment gateway, on the instructions by Visa and Mastercard. Last June 9, DataCell informed Visa/Mastercard and Teller of the intention to file a complaint to the EU Commission regarding VISA’s and Mastercard’s violation of EU Competition regulation. Also, it planned to initiate a lawsuit in Denmark to claim damages. “Since 9th June 2011, DataCell has not received any substantial answer from the credit card companies, besides confirmations of receipt. However, today we have observed that an alternative payment processor that we have contracted with, has in fact opened the gateway for payments with Visa and Mastercard, and now also for American Express Card payments, which is an option we did not had before," DataCell said. But it said the battle is by far not over, as it will still initiate the lawsuit in Denmark to claim damages for the lasst seven months. “We consider it likely that we will file the complaint before the EU Commission," Fink and Sigurvinsson said. For its part, hacktivist group Anonymous —which earlier claimed responsibility for a brief outage of MasterCard’s website last month— said that Visa and MasterCard’s move “may be a response to legal pressure from the group or may yet be a slip-up." Visa and MasterCard suffered a DDoS late last year from Anonymous and WikiLeaks supporters for holding back financial donations. MasterCard’s site was attacked last June, with the hacker “Ibomhacktivist" claiming that the attack was motivated by MasterCard’s suspension of WikiLeaks’ ability to accept donations. “MasterCard.com DOWN!!!, thats what you get when you mess with @wikileaks @Anon_Central and the enter community of lulz loving individuals :D," the hacker said in a tweet. But MasterCard spokesperson Jennifer Stalzer said the incident was due to an ISP outage “that impacted multiple users." — TJD, GMA News