Thanks for the links to those other posts - don't know why I didn't try searching various forums here before posting my question, always do that on sites like Reddit because if you don't a bunch of people will jump down your throat for asking a question that's already been answered, and they can get pretty nasty with their insults,  posting stuff they would never have the nerve to say to your face. Your 2nd link contains an important piece of info - since SESTA/FOSTA was enacted many financial institutes won't allow their CC's to be used to pay for access to adult websites anymore - someone posted in that thread that the same thing happened to P411 recently and it took over a month to resolve. A bunch of conservative states are also enacting laws that require everyone to provide a government issued ID like a driver's license to a website or 3rd party just to VIEW legit porn online - doubt that's constitutional - the ACLU already filed a lawsuit against Mastercard for their adult content policies.

Interesting observations, and makes a lot of sense to me. A finding I would hope TER admins might have been able to provide if the OP had simple reached out to TER rather than making a rant on the board. Might be something TER might add to their payment pages.

 
Based on the behaviour of the payment effort not sure why the OP would jump to thinking the site must have been hacked or something. Looks more like poor exception processing in that no mention of address verification was mentioned before offering an alternative means to pay. But I suppose you never know until you learn the hard way.

 
Also, did TER completely quit allowing prepaid cards as a form of payment? Thought that was still an option.

I tried to post another msg that I was able to renew VIP today, but it didn't go thru for some reason - my internet connections hasn't been stable today, or maybe it just got lost in the ether - here's the important part of it:

 
"In any case, problem is resolved, just successfully renewed my VIP membership - their CC processor must have had a temporary glitch that got fixed - I tried 3 times each in two different browsers then gave up and posted here for help - my VIP membership was about to expire. I buy tons of stuff online from various sellers and occasionally run into this temp CC verification problem on other sites, but those glitches typically last for seconds, not > 5 minutes - like when you're trying to buy some stuff from Amazon but get the "we can't show your cart right now", or whatever that msg says - the problem never lasts more than 5-10 seconds."

All good now - thanks for the responses to everyone who replied.  BTW, the goddess Miss Naomi is visiting my city in  two weeks, already have an appt. set up - I forget which website where I noticed she was coming to Tyson's Corner (might have been her site), so I emailed her to ask if she was stopping by on the way back to NYC - today her website shows "no tours", so maybe she's already booked up now - but if you've seen her before and want to see her again (and who wouldn't?), it's probably worth emailing her if you're in the VA/MD area. With my luck the gal at the top of my "must see when she's here" list, Carol's Raphaela Rios, will be here the same week - oh good, probably not - just checked Carol's schedule and she's in Houston this week, lots of cities between me and TX, no way she flies from there to here in the next two weeks (I hope!).