In plain English: this Acceptable Use Policy lists the businesses and behaviors that may not be conducted on the Clear Finance platform. If your business does any of these — or starts doing them after onboarding — you must stop immediately, disclose to us in writing within forty-eight (48) hours, and accept the consequences in the Merchant Services Agreement. Operating outside of this Acceptable Use Policy is a material breach.
This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) describes businesses and activities that are not permitted on the Clear Finance payments platform. It applies to all merchants, applicants, integrators, principal officers, beneficial owners, contractors, and users of our APIs, dashboards, embeds, and websites. We adopt this policy to comply with the operating rules of Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover; with applicable U.S. and state law; with U.S. economic sanctions and export-control law; and with the requirements of our acquiring, sponsor-bank, and processing partners.
We may update this AUP at any time and from time to time. Continued use of the services after a change constitutes acceptance. We may suspend, hold funds, terminate, claw back, and indemnify against any account that violates this AUP, with or without notice and with or without cure period, consistent with our Terms of Service and Merchant Services Agreement.
PROHIBITED BUSINESSES AND ACTIVITIES
The following businesses and activities are not permitted on the platform. The list is illustrative, not exhaustive — Clear Finance reserves the right to designate any other business or activity as prohibited in our sole discretion, including retroactively.
1. Adult and sexual content
1.1. Pornography, escort services, or other adult-oriented goods or services.
1.2. Sexually oriented online dating where payments are tied to messaging or matches.
1.3. Adult cam sites, adult subscriptions, or adult-fulfillment dropshipping.
2. Gambling and games of chance
2.1. Real-money gambling, sports betting, online casinos, fantasy contests with prizes, lotteries, raffles, or sweepstakes operating without proper licensing.
2.2. Skill-game wagering, prediction-market wagering, or virtual-currency wagering.
3. Controlled substances and prohibited products
3.1. Illegal drugs, drug paraphernalia, synthetic cannabinoids, and research chemicals offered for human consumption.
3.2. Cannabis (THC) products, regardless of state legalization, except where permitted through licensed and supported processing rails (not currently supported on this platform).
3.3. Tobacco, e-cigarettes, vaping products, and nicotine pouches.
3.4. Firearms, ammunition, suppressors, and weapons of any kind, including conversion devices, magazines beyond legal capacity, and ghost-gun kits.
3.5. Prescription pharmaceuticals or controlled substances sold without proper licensing, medical evaluation, or compliance with state and federal law.
3.6. Steroids, growth hormone, research peptides for human consumption, and any compound on the DEA controlled list.
4. Financial and investment activities
4.1. Multi-level marketing, pyramid schemes, matrix programs, and any recruitment-incentivized commerce model.
4.2. Get-rich-quick schemes, “guaranteed return” offers, “passive income” advertisements, and unregistered investment opportunities.
4.3. Unregistered securities, ICOs, token offerings, NFT mints offered as investment vehicles, and yield-generating tokenized products.
4.4. Debt collection, debt-elimination, credit-repair, and student-loan-discharge services that are not properly licensed in each operating jurisdiction.
4.5. Cryptocurrency exchanges, mixers, unhosted-wallet sales, peer-to-peer fiat-to-crypto facilitation, and crypto-ATM operations.
4.6. Cash-equivalent businesses including check cashing, money transmission, currency exchange, prepaid-card sales, and unauthorized money services.
4.7. Online forex / CFD / binary-options brokers without applicable U.S. or foreign authorization.
5. Deceptive marketing and consumer harm
5.1. Negative-option subscriptions or hidden recurring charges that fail to disclose terms before purchase consistent with the FTC's ROSCA / Negative-Option Rule and the parallel state statutes (CA, NY, IL, others).
5.2. Deceptive advertising, including bait-and-switch, false-scarcity, manipulated testimonials, undisclosed influencer compensation, and unsubstantiated health, weight-loss, or income claims.
5.3. Telemarketing or outbound calling that does not comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, Do-Not-Call regulations, robocall restrictions, and state telemarketing laws.
5.4. Unsolicited bulk commercial email that violates CAN-SPAM or equivalent law.
5.5. Dark-pattern checkout, undisclosed-fee checkout, or post-transaction surprise billing.
6. Intellectual-property infringement and counterfeit goods
6.1. Sale of counterfeit, replica, or unauthorized branded merchandise.
6.2. Unlicensed sale of copyrighted material, including pirated software, media, e-books, IPTV subscriptions, and streaming content.
6.3. Trademark- or service-mark-infringing dropship merchandise.
7. Hate, violence, and extremism
7.1. Goods or services promoting hate, violence, or discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or national origin.
7.2. Sale of materials supporting designated terrorist or extremist organizations.
7.3. Glorification of mass violence, paramilitary training services, and recruiting for violent extremist movements.
8. Network and acquirer restrictions
8.1. Any business listed on Visa BRAM, Visa VDMP / VFMP / VAMP / VIRP, Mastercard ECM / BAU, Mastercard QMAP, or any equivalent restricted-business or excessive-risk program.
8.2. Any business operating in a category for which our acquiring or processing partners have not provided processing support.
8.3. Aggregation, factoring, or processing payments on behalf of an unrelated party (“transaction laundering”).
8.4. Submission of transactions outside the merchant's approved MCC, descriptor, or product scope.
9. Other prohibited activities
9.1. Illegal activity of any kind under U.S. federal, state, foreign, or local law applicable to the transaction.
9.2. Violations of U.S. export-control or sanctions law, including transactions involving jurisdictions or persons subject to OFAC sanctions (currently including but not limited to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, the Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions, and any SDN-listed person or entity).
9.3. Activities likely to attract excessive disputes or that we identify as high-risk fraud, including transaction-laundering, identity-theft monetization, and chargeback-fraud cooperation.
9.4. Use of the platform to transmit malware, run denial-of-service attacks, scrape merchant or transaction data, or otherwise harm the security or integrity of our infrastructure or third-party systems.
9.5. Use of the platform to facilitate human trafficking, child sexual abuse material, exploitation of minors, or any activity prohibited by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the PROTECT Act, or any analogue.
9.6. Submission of transactions you know or should know to be associated with stolen card data, BIN attacks, or carding rings.
REPORTING VIOLATIONS
If you believe a merchant on the platform is violating this AUP, please report it at support@theclearfinance.com. Reports are reviewed by our compliance team and, where warranted, escalated for action.
ENFORCEMENT
We investigate suspected violations and take action consistent with our risk and compliance program, the operating rules of the card networks, and applicable law. Action may include warnings, increased monitoring, reserves, payout holds, account suspension, termination, claw-back of past settlement, indemnification claims, and reporting to acquirers, networks, sponsor banks, regulators, or law-enforcement authorities. Clear Finance may add a terminated merchant to the MATCH (Member Alert to Control High-Risk Merchants) list, the VMSS, or any analogue and you waive any objection to such listing where the underlying violation is established.
SURVIVAL
Your duty to disclose violations under this AUP, and Clear Finance's right to enforce against past violations, survive termination of your account indefinitely and are subject to the twenty-four (24)-month claw-back window in the Merchant Services Agreement §10.
Version 2026.05.23. Effective 2026-05-23.