For years, adult creators have said banks shut their accounts, froze their money or refused them loans with little or no explanation. Washington just published a long report on exactly that kind of treatment, and the adult industry isn’t in it.

According to the Riverfront Times‘ Bryce Canyon, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s new 47-page report, titled “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” never mentions adult creators once, even though an earlier version of the agency’s findings named adult media among the businesses that banks had singled out.

What the report found

According to CBS News‘ Aimee Picchi, the report from the Treasury Department’s banking regulator concluded that the nine largest national banks it supervises had policies that let political, religious or business-activity concerns sway who got service. The agency reviewed 100,000 complaints and hundreds of bank decisions made between 2020 and September 2025.

The banks covered are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank and BMO Bank. The review grew out of President Trump’s 2025 executive order directing regulators to look into financial institutions that turned away customers over their views or lawful business activities.

Picchi reports that examples in the report include WePay, a now-defunct payment processor JPMorgan Chase acquired in 2017, which closed accounts of several merchants selling MAGA or Trump-related items. The OCC also found that businesses in oil and gas exploration, coal mining and firearms were restricted from some financial services. A JPMorgan spokesperson told CBS that WePay’s processes “did not meet our expectations,” and that the company fixed the problem and the business no longer operates.

Adult media went missing

Canyon points out that the OCC’s preliminary report did name the adult industry. It said some banks “strictly restricted access to, or required escalated review for, certain financial products or services in connection with customers engaged in the sale or distribution of adult media.”

That line is gone from the final version. According to the Riverfront Times, the new report leans mostly on cases involving conservative and right-wing companies and industries seen as disfavored by the political left, and its very first example is a merchant selling MAGA-themed merchandise.

The irony, Canyon writes, is that the report’s general findings read a lot like adult creators’ complaints. It says banks mostly lacked clear, measurable standards and objective, risk-based criteria for judging reputation risk, and that customers were often left without any meaningful explanation for a bank’s decisions.

A creator’s real-world squeeze

The Riverfront Times points to adult creator Isla Moon as an example. According to the outlet, she employs more than 60 people, and when her bank learned how she makes her money it refused to let her borrow against her investments, something other investors are typically allowed to do. To keep her television series going and make payroll, she cashed out her investments, including her retirement savings.

Other federal moves haven’t changed much for the industry so far, the paper reports. The Federal Trade Commission has warned card and payment companies not to deny service over lawful activities seen as high-risk, and the OCC and FDIC have dropped “reputation risk” as a supervision factor. But in April, new IRS deductions for tipped workers excluded money earned from “pornographic activity.”

What creators can do now

The OCC says it will keep reviewing account terminations and may put out more guidance or rules. In the meantime, according to the Riverfront Times, debanked adult workers can file a complaint at HelpWithMyBank.gov, and the Free Speech Coalition is collecting banking-discrimination stories to pass along anonymously to policymakers.

The takeaway

The federal government has now put in writing that big banks cut off lawful customers using vague, unexplained standards. Adult creators have been saying the same thing for years, and they were briefly named in this fight before being dropped. If you earn on OnlyFans or similar platforms, keep records of every frozen account or denied product, file the complaint, and share your story. The more paper trail there is, the harder it gets to leave creators out of the next report.

Image: United States Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., photo by Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).