But what kind of risk would that be? For adolescents and auto insurance, it makes sense to me (higher testosterone levels, less driving experience, not yet fully developed sense of risks/consequences, fewer spouses/children who depend on their livelihood etc. etc.)

But why would fraud be more prevalent specifically in the adult content industry than the average over all the industries? Do criminals prefer working in porn than elsewhere? Why? Or do chargebacks simply occur more often due to spouses disputing a charge in an attempt to save face in front of their partner?

Adult industry is digital content that can be "purchased" and then scraped before the chargeback goes through. Now the user has all the content that the site/model/whoever offers and didn't pay anything for it; they can then share it around, resell it, whatever.

It helps that a lot of people have no respect for the people producing the content; they'll happily consume it, but they refuse to acknowledge any work that goes into it or that people should be compensated for what they've created.

Wife goes "was this you?" "no, I must have been hacked".

The stats I've seen actually did put the charge back rate is high compared to other industries.

What does seem like a scam though is, especially in the digital space, a refund is basically free. The merchant could agree in the case of any charge back the credit card company can just take it back, they won't argue, just take it. They'd even agree to pay the transaction fee.

But you can't, so you get the 20% fee, and you still get the money clawed back from you.

There’s going to be a lot of the spouse saving face chargebacks, people using stolen card numbers to download porn to avoid exposing their use to anyone else, active use of porn sites as a means of laundering funds from stolen card numbers—if you’re in an organization that does prostitution and card theft, you can use a third-party porn site to turn stolen card numbers into cash, etc.