Fantia unavailable in EU now?

[anonhog]

Yesterday access to the site worked fine and all but today:
- Fantia.jp itself gives me a 403 forbidden error
- Otakumode where I could previously buy Tora Coins has them unable to be shipped to my country and now I cant even find them in the store.
- Found almost no info about this elsewhere except one reddit thread where people from other EU countrys confirm they got the same 2 issues above.

Can anyone confirm/deny these issues?

 

[eskelet]

Same here. I bought a sub 3 months in advance before visa and mastercard puritans shat the bed. I don't understand what changed though. Did some law get passed or is it just another case of Japanese technological brilliance? You can use a vpn to salvage your subs.

 

[anonhog]

My uninformed guess would be either:
1. With mastercard/visa they decided it would be easiest to just block EU countrys to avoid further problems.
or
2. Could also have to do with the EU requiring stricter age verification methods from the bigger adult content sites and they dont wanna deal with all that so they just block.

Also, thanks for the info .VPN were the solution . North America seems to work. For fantia setting it to NA allows access. For Otakumode you need to set both the VPN and the Shipping Adress to NA and you can buy codes again.

 

[Hagatagar]

Yes, Fantia.jp stopped support for Europe, UK included.
Every subscription seems to be canceled too.

 

[Iexist]

Subscriptions weren't cancelled, to my knowledge. If you can use VPN, the account is still there, and any active subscriptions are still active. If you can get Tora Coins, or have a JCB card or whatever, you can still keep paying.

Also, it's not all countries in Europe. Non-EU member countries seem to still be able to access Fantia.

No official announcement from them about anything though.

 

[Built Different]

Yes, Fantia.jp stopped support for Europe, UK included.
Every subscription seems to be canceled too.

FFs so that's what happened. Sigh.. any recomendations on good free vpn to bypass jap idiocy?

 

[Iexist]

Honestly, this whole situation is overall extremely bizarre.

On the one hand, it sounds like Fantia informed the Tokyo Otaku peeps to no longer sell TORA coins to the affected countries.

On the other hand, they haven't sent out any other official messages of any other kind, and people that were paying for stuff suddenly found themselves unable to access the stuff they paid for, unless they use VPN. I wonder if they can be sued for this? I don't have the kind of time or money to do something that ridiculous, but mayhaps there'll be some people that can and will.

Furthermore, while some people have cited some specific EU initiative as the potential cause for this, looking into it, it has some fairly specific conditions that are unlikely to apply to Fantia (See, regular monthly active users from the EU specifically being over 45 million)... Fantia's reasonably popular outside of JP, but I doubt there's over 45 million European peeps from the EU member states with active accounts over there.

PornHub might not have those numbers, and that's for more well known and accessible to EU users...

So that bit of legislation being the cause seems unlikely in the extreme. Not to mention that it doesn't affect the UK anyway.

I've seen one bit of speculation saying that this might be a more extreme version of what Pixiv did. Pixiv recently created completely separate ToS for the UK and US, specifically as part of their efforts to retain the services of VISA, MasterCard and PayPal. Mayhaps, Fantia is trying to cock-block these countries to regain the usage of VISA and MasterCard, because there are plenty of Asian users with those brands, and there are more than a few clues floating around that VISA and MasterCard have been pushing their stupidity for political reasons more than anything else.

The reality, however, is that no one knows anything. Not even Fantia's business partners. Fantia's totally silent on the subject even though people have been pestering them on the site formerly known as Twitter and via their support e-mails. It's not just followers that are concerned after all, but creators too.

 

[eskelet]

FFs so that's what happened. Sigh.. any recomendations on good free vpn to bypass jap idiocy?

There are no good free vpns to be honest. Some people say opera browser, but installing chinesium spyware is kinda eh (also the last time I checked it was slow as fuck).
If you are willing to spend $5 then I recommend Mullvad. Doesn't require account in a traditional sense. You just get a number assigned to you and you can download files with tunnels to use in any open source vpn software. Or you can use their app if you don't want to bother.

 

[Ratrio]

I'm pissed tbh, I had a ton of months paid for with a certain model and I was planning to save all her content to my hard drive. Didn't realise that if I lost my sub I wouldn't have access to the content I paid for. Now I can't even access the site, even if I could pay.

 

[Sushi101]

I'm pissed tbh, I had a ton of months paid for with a certain model and I was planning to save all her content to my hard drive. Didn't realise that if I lost my sub I wouldn't have access to the content I paid for. Now I can't even access the site, even if I could pay.

You can access it through a VPN with an exit node in Japan or US, I tried with Japan (Proton VPN) and was able to connect and gather my shit.

I've read that there's something going on with Visa/Mastercard and the rest of the world, basically every payment made with these entities result in additional fees that everyone wants to go away from

I don't know why right now, but it's been in the works of banks of certain countries (I saw EU and China possibly creating their own counterpart)

 

[Iexist]

Well, Fantia unblocked the EU. The same can't be said about the UK. They made an announcement

You must be registered to see the links

.

This likely means that whatever's going on, it's not related to the EU's legislations.

On the other hand, if it's related to them trying to get back VISA and MasterCard, there's a decent chance that the US is next on the chopping block of restricted access.

Of course, it's still all speculation at the moment. Fantia haven't said WHY they're doing this at all.

All in all, I wouldn't get rid of the VPNs just yet...

 

[Fatso999]

Well, Fantia unblocked the EU. The same can't be said about the UK. They made an announcement

You must be registered to see the links

.

This likely means that whatever's going on, it's not related to the EU's legislations.

On the other hand, if it's related to them trying to get back VISA and MasterCard, there's a decent chance that the US is next on the chopping block of restricted access.

Of course, it's still all speculation at the moment. Fantia haven't said WHY they're doing this at all.

All in all, I wouldn't get rid of the VPNs just yet...

the fact they havent explained why they did it in the first place makes me think they're going to just block it again in future...I won't be touching them again I guess. Unsubbed from all the creators I had subbed whilst putting my reason for leaving as "Fantia banned my country"

Especially since they were happy to take your money then block access with zero notification

 

[Built Different]

Feels weird no reason at all and the fact they unblocked EU but UK is still on fuck off list is even weirder

 

[Iexist]

Some people are speculating that this is because of the UK's Online Safety Act, which, uh... is a horrible piece of legislation. If what I've read about it so far is accurate, it's horribly open ended, and on top of that, allows the UK to fine companies for 18 million pounds or more if they fail to comply. Quite frankly, that'd be a ruinous sum for Fantia. They're big, but they're not THAT big...

That said, this is bad news for the US, since the US has a similarly horrible piece of legislation that keeps going back and forth in their system, and has been floating around for years now. If that gets through, there's a good chance the US will be shafted too, and by more than just Fantia.

This is in spite of the fact that plenty of people have been pointing out how stupid and bad legislation of this type ends up being and the problems it tends to cause.

Either way, it's not guaranteed that the EU is out of the woods yet... but who knows? We can only wait and see.