chase bank discriminating?

[+ Tom Isern]

i've read news reports that chase bank has been closing the accounts of customers who are involved in the adult entertainment industry. you can see one such report here:

 

http://jezebel.com/chase-bank-is-shutting-down-porn-actors-bank-accounts-1566759503

 

i’d like to know if this is true. does anyone have better info?

[Newly]

Don't know if it's true but although it may be discriminatory it's not illegal, the adult entertainment industry is not a protected class and banks are therefor free to allow it to bank with them or not. Many payment types that we deal with specifically prohibit the payment type from being used for adult entertainment, gambling, tobacco, and multiple other categories that are seen by some as vices. It's not that the bank gives a hoot about the "morality" part of it, they just don't want to be burned. If someone pays an escort, for example, $20k he could go into his state's legal system and claim that any obligation he had to pay was void and could not be enforced because it was against the state's public policy. If the court agreed, and they very well might, the bank would get stuck with the lost. There was a famous case in California not too long ago where someone who had accumulated an 80K credit card charge from gambling in Vegas had a court in California enjoin the issuing bank from enforcing the charge because gambling was illegal in that jurisdiction, thus it was against their public policy to uphold such an agreement. Kind of like trying to enforce a contract with a hit man, obviously no court would enforce that. I'm not saying that I agree with it morally, but if I was lending money I would be sure to rule out anything that could be construed as being against the public policy of the jurisdiction where the borrower lives.