isa USA has quietly set up a system over the last year to eliminate the use of its branded cards on Web sites that deal in child pornography and other objectionable material. Visa is utilizing Web crawlers and "spidering" techniques to search more than one million sites a day and is then passing the information along to law enforcement agencies.

According to abcnews.com, which cited The Christian Science Monitor as the story's source, Visa is also requiring the 7,000 financial institutions that are members of its association in the U.S. to register merchants who process adult content and accept Visa cards for purchasing the material. If the institutions don't comply, they risk losing their Visa relationship.

Recently, Web sites have begun to charge a fee to access their material. According to Visa, 80% of the 400 Web sites it has identified as objectionable have been shut down by law enforcement, or their Visa privileges have been revoked.

Visa began looking at the issue of adult entertainment in late 2001 and wanted to make sure its cards were not being used for illegal activity. The company said it looks at sites and merchants on a case-by-case basis.