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Two layers of law: federal and state
Federally, 18 U.S.C. 2257 and 2257A require the producer of sexually explicit depictions to hold age and identity records for every performer and to publish a custodian-of-records statement with a physical address. At state level, age verification is now mandatory in a growing list of states: Louisiana HB142 came first in 2022, Texas HB1181 followed and was upheld by the Supreme Court in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in 2025, with Utah, Virginia, Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi and others on the same model. Most of these statutes bite when a substantial share of the site is material harmful to minors, so we build geo-aware age assurance: a verified check for a Texas visitor, a lighter gate where no such law applies.
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Payments: Stripe and PayPal are not an option
Stripe, PayPal, Square and Shopify Payments all exclude adult content in their acceptable-use policies, and a direct integration ends in termination with a rolling reserve held. The working set is the adult specialists: CCBill, Epoch, SegPay, Verotel, Netbilling, or RocketGate paired with a high-risk acquirer. Card-scheme rules add their own layer - adult merchants must be registered under Visa and Mastercard specialty programmes, and Mastercard standards for user-generated adult content require documented age and consent for every performer, pre-publication review and a working complaints and appeals process. We build those workflows into the admin panel instead of bolting them on after the first audit.
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Languages and regional expectations
Russian-speaking demand concentrates in Brooklyn and the wider New York area, South Florida, Los Angeles and Chicago. In practice that means English as the default plus a full Russian version with its own copy, its own SEO and Russian-speaking support - not a machine translation of the English. Spanish is worth adding for Florida, Texas and California. US visitors also expect US conventions: month-first dates, imperial units, ZIP-based search, 12-hour time and state-level filtering.
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Structure, hosting and DMCA
Most US operators keep the entity in the US (an LLC in Wyoming, Delaware or Nevada) and the site on adult-tolerant hosting, because mainstream clouds enforce content policies more aggressively than the law requires. Register a DMCA designated agent with the Copyright Office and publish the takedown contact - without registration the safe harbour is simply unavailable. Store 2257 records in infrastructure separated from the public site, with its own access log and retention rules, so a records request is a query rather than a project. NDA by default, no client references.