Substack BIOMETRIC SCANS, New US Identity Verification Laws & Authors Hit with Chargebacks Due to This Chaos

A complete and total disaster for us all, especially authors. Let me show you why...

I had no intention of publishing anything today because my next article (which is a bombshell) comes out tomorrow, but this is so important that it cannot wait.

---

Substack has enacted biometric scans for a large quantity of Australian citizens.

Those who refused to submit are being locked out of their accounts. This seems illegal being that many of the people getting locked out of their accounts are my paid subs. Meaning, they have been cut off from using a service that they paid in advance for and are still being billed for.

Here’s proof that this is indeed a paid subscriber, and has been for a long time:

This is now creating complete and total chaos. My subscribers (and income) are plummeting like never before. It continues to go down by the day.

This brings us to the second problem:

PLEASE STOP FILING CHARGEBACKS

I know you are locked out of your account and paying for a service you have no way of using unless you submit to a service you don’t want, which is insane. But before you file a chargeback with your bank against the payment, please hear me out:

As a reader, you may be thinking I am crying because someone gave me $5 then decided they wanted their money back, so they went to their bank and filed a chargeback against the purchase, resulting in the $5 being ripped out of my bank account and returned to them. I assure you, this is not the problem. Let me explain the problem to you.

It starts with the author being raped. When you pay $5, I only get $3.98.

Even that is not the problem. The problem is that the corrupt banking system charges the author additional fees each time a chargeback is filed. Currently, the fee per chargeback is $15. This means not only is the original $5 removed from my account and returned to the subscriber, but an additional $15 is charged to me as a penalty for the reader filing the chargeback. I am now out $20 to refund $5 (even though I never got $5, I only got $3.98!) This money enriches the banks. But even that isn’t where it ends. Now let’s look at the $50/year chargeback.

In this case, someone signed up for a yearly membership in October, then got locked out of their account in December. Out of their initial payment of $50, I was paid $43.

Then, when they filed the dispute, $50 was taken from me, plus the $15 dispute fee, plus the other fees, which leaves me owing the bank $21.75 out of my personal money to refund the $50 which they already took.

Now if I want to fight the dispute and try to “win” my money back, that costs an additional $15. This means, to try to get my $50 back, which was never $50 because I only got paid $43, I would have to pay out an additional $36.75 out of my family’s bank account.

The bank almost always sides with its customer, the cardholder, so I have found that there is very little value in gambling the additional $15. On my end, it is a lesser loss to dip into my own bank account and pay the bank their robbery fees than to gamble on a $43 victory. Now let’s go back to this Substack disaster.

If 300 people file chargebacks against me, just in $15 chargeback fees, that is $4,500 that I must gift to the bank for no legitimate reason. This is in addition to the refund to each individual. Let’s say those 300 people each paid $5 for a monthly membership. That is another $1,500. Just these two amounts come to $6,000 to refund $1,500 because Substack chose to lock people out of their accounts instead of giving them a chance to close the account and deactivate their subscriptions.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD

If you are owed a refund because you have no way to use what you are paying for, please respond to this email or reach out to me directly (Agent131711 at Proton.me). Let me know the email address on your Substack account, and give me a few days to get it done for you.

Now let’s look at this biometrics thing again…

WHO IS RUNNING THE BIOMETRICS PROGRAM?

As I showed you in the first screenshot, Persona is the company that is being used to verify identities. As you can see, the notice says the scan will be used to “improve Persona’s platform” in accordance with their privacy policy.

If we go to their privacy policy and scroll down the page, we find out they are working with Smile ID.

Smile ID is a digital ID company that is especially active in Africa.

Here is what their cell phone app looks like:

They have already partnered with MasterCard in Africa.

And so many more companies. Here are a few.

On their privacy policy, their address is listed as 981 Mission Street, San Francisco, California 94103.

That address brings us here:

Which is a shared office space called Trellis.

Here you can pay monthly for a standard desk or a deluxe desk:

Which will run you around $375 a month, depending on which plan you choose.

So this company who is running biometrics for Substack, is working out of a shared office desk in San Francisco?

Let’s go back to SmileID, which is a partner of Persona.

On the SmileID site, in their privacy policy section, we learn they “enable third-party tracking mechanisms to collect information.” They say, quote, “third parties, such as Facebook, may use personal information deposited in our App to target online ads to persons who may have used our app.” - So they not only collect our biometric data, they install trackers and sell or gift our info so we can be spammed with ads and who really knows what else.

By the way, if you continue to read the lengthy policy, it says “Persons who may wish to access, correct, or delete the personal information we have on file, may contact us at compliance@usesmileid.com”.

SmileID has four addresses listed.

The Nigeria address brings us to a desk.

The UK Address brings us to another shared office space, this time in the Station House.

The South Africa address brings us to an office building.

And the Kenya address takes us to a building…

In which a banking tech company called Verto resides. I assume this is it.

And I also assume if I dug for a while, I would be able to connect SmileID to the banking company.

All of this is weird, right? Like, there isn’t any building with a big sign on the door that says SmileID or Persona where people can speak to someone. There isn’t even a closed-door building with a company logo on it that identifies the business that works within, yet their tech is being forced upon us, we are being basically extorted into giving them our biometric data if we want to use what we are paying for, and we now know some of what happens to the data after they collect it, none of which is ok with us.

And all of this is not limited to Africa and Australia. In the United States, Texas, Utah, and Louisiana just passed verification laws requiring cell phone apps to verify ages. Here is the email an associate received on December 16th, 2025, from the Google Play Store:

Apple sent out the same thing. The bottom line is, if you wish to continue using cell phone apps, you will be forced to submit.

With that being said, ShadowbannedLibrary.com opens in only 12 days. My partner, Medicine Girl and I have listened to your feedback, and we decided we WILL incorporate blogging into our site. You will be able to access my free articles for free and our paid sub exclusives as paid sub exclusives. Additionally, you will be getting so much more value for your dollar because we finally have control over the platform, so the options are nearly limitless. Great things are coming! All articles on our site have a read out loud feature too!

If you can please take the below survey for me, I would really appreciate it. The question is, do you prefer light colored sites or dark colors for binge reading?

Examples for comparison:

Right now, I have Shadowbanned Library set up as a dark theme, but tell me what you want in the survey below:

Other than that,

Be sure to join our WhatsApp group because it is the only way we can ensure we will maintain communication with you even if you (or we) are booted off Substack in the next dozen days: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GSAjiCNNcUY1Q42e1nLxNM?mode=wwt

I only post on WhatsApp once a day, so you don’t have to worry about being harassed all day long.

If you would like to make a donation to the library, every penny helps. We estimate our costs, as of January 2026, to be approximately $4,500 a month. Without supporters, we cannot change the trajectory of what is to come.

My bombshell article, the final chapter of the Kosher series, comes out tomorrow, December 21st. Here’s a teaser:

If you haven’t read the Kosher series, you really should because it impacts you, me, and everyone, worldwide:

OR CHECK OUT:

---

---

---

---