On October 26, 2026, XBIZ published a breakdown by Len Garcia, chief sales officer at adult-focused processor Centrobill, of what Mastercard's Scam Merchant Monitoring Program (SMMP) means for adult merchants. The program itself is not new. According to ChargebackHelp, Mastercard introduced it in a July 2025 update to its Security Rules and Procedures, began screening new merchant websites at onboarding in January 2026, and has enforced it in full since July 24, 2026. It applies worldwide to card-not-present merchants, including sub-merchants under payment facilitators. Garcia says Mastercard's guidance specifically lists adult content and dating platforms, along with subscriptions, digital goods and forex, as business models that warrant closer attention.

Why It Matters

Payment access is still the main operational risk for adult businesses, and SMMP changes how that risk works: from a slow decline you can manage to a possible **72-hour cutoff**. The decision sits with the merchant's acquirer, not the merchant. The discreet billing that customers expect from sex-toy shops, cam sites and creator platforms also produces the refunds and disputes that set off the trigger. Note that this explainer comes from a processor that sells to the affected merchants, but its description of the rules matches independent chargeback-industry guidance. Expect acquirers to tighten underwriting for new adult MIDs and want documentation in advance.

The mechanism is what's different. Mastercard's existing Excessive Chargeback and Excessive Fraud programs are ratio-based: a merchant crosses a threshold and gets fines and time to fix the problem. SMMP is signal-based. When a trigger fires, the acquirer has 72 hours to investigate, and if scam activity is confirmed, Mastercard and Maestro acceptance can be terminated immediately. The trigger getting the most attention combines refunds and chargebacks into a single 5% threshold. It applies during a merchant account's first six months of acceptance, once the account processes at least 500 transactions in a rolling 30 days. Voluntary refunds count toward the total. ChargebackHelp notes that this 5% rule does not apply to every merchant.

Garcia's warning is about account structure. The six-month window applies to each merchant ID (MID), not to the company. Changing acquirers, adding a legal entity or entering a new market can restart the clock. Large adult platforms commonly spread volume across several MIDs and banks for redundancy, which "may look structurally similar, on paper," to a bad actor opening new accounts to escape poor numbers. He also says adult merchants have built-in friction: discreet billing descriptors that customers don't recognize lead to refund requests and "friendly fraud" disputes. His advice is to track refund causes, use recognizable descriptors, document why each MID exists, and avoid delaying refunds or splitting volume to manage a ratio. Those tactics produce the patterns SMMP is designed to detect.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-27

Initial entry — story first created.