Paul Paolucci, the top cop for one of the world’s biggest credit card companies, sure had some interesting friends.
One made a fortune fronting for pornography websites that needed access to Mastercard’s and Visa’s payment networks. Paolucci, who oversaw Mastercard’s merchant fraud control, was photographed cavorting around the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel with him and a group of women in white corset minidresses.
A second was a Lamborghini-driving e-commerce mogul with whom Paolucci used to celebrate family holidays. The mogul ended up in prison for a financial crime he committed, in part, using Mastercard’s network.
An executive at a famously corrupt European bank claimed to have dined with Paolucci and gotten his help evading Mastercard’s regulations.
It was Paolucci’s job to make sure that the banks and companies using Mastercard’s network were playing by the rules. He bent those rules himself by getting close to the very kinds of high-risk businesses he was supposed to be watching like a hawk — so close, in fact, that they sometimes seemed to be working together. Eventually, one of those friendships led him to break the rules entirely, and it cost him his job. But though Paolucci crossed a line, for Mastercard — and its global rival, Visa — a permissive relationship with fraudulent, exploitative, or in some cases even criminal enterprises is no exception. It’s the norm.
A yearlong BuzzFeed News investigation reveals that both Mastercard…
