By ANDREW R.C. MARSHALL, JASON SZEP and LINDA SO
Many top porn stars on OnlyFans hire ‘chatters’ to impersonate them online and entice subscribers into splurging on explicit content. These impostors aren’t formally affiliated with OnlyFans but have brought it riches – and new legal threats. Some subscribers say the deception amounts to fraud. One shares his story of betrayal.
When Patrick Kunz began chatting with a porn star on OnlyFans in April 2022, he couldn’t believe his luck. Nikki was a blonde Hungarian bombshell who resembled his first girlfriend.
Soon, using the social media site’s messaging function, he was chatting with Nikki about everything from their sexual fantasies to their shared love of cats. Kunz, who is 42 and works for an insurance company in Germany, paid her hundreds of dollars to make sex videos just for him, and thousands more in tips.
He fell deeply in love, he said. Nikki said she loved him, too.
Then Kunz started noticing strange things. She seemed to forget subjects they’d already discussed – a recipe for overnight oats, a picture of her own cats. He started asking questions.
“Who are you?” wrote Kunz, who allowed Reuters to read his OnlyFans chats with Nikki.
“What do you meann, babyyy?” came the reply. “It’s meee!☹️”
Kunz slowly realized he was chatting to more than one person. “I fell for her,” he said, “but I’m not stupid.” He was beguiled, he said, by an illusion of intimacy created by a “fraudulent” system.
OnlyFans is a porn-driven, subscription-based website where content creators and their followers can develop what it calls “authentic relationships” by messaging each other. But many popular OnlyFans creators, including porn stars earning millions of dollars through the website, outsource the task of messaging their subscribers to paid impersonators known as “chatters.” It is their job to coax subscribers into tipping the creators and buying more porn.
The presence of chatters on OnlyFans has been documented before, often as a quirky if dubious byproduct of the platform’s runaway success. But a Reuters investigation found they play an essential supporting role in OnlyFans’ business, sustaining a fundamental deception that both hooks and harms loyal customers and brings legal risks to the platform.
OnlyFans doesn’t employ chatters or even acknowledge their existence. Still, they form part of a largely unregulated global ecosystem that has evolved alongside the company’s explosive growth. They are often hired by agencies that manage many top OnlyFans content creators, sometimes referred to as models. All three – agencies, creators and chatters – share the same goal: to persuade subscribers to spend as much money as possible on the models’ accounts.
The deception has been lucrative, helping to generate sensational profits for OnlyFans. The company takes 20% of its creators’ earnings, a cut worth almost $1.1 billion in revenue in 2022 alone. But the use of chatters undermines OnlyFans’ promise of direct connections between creators and subscribers, while exposing often intimate details that subscribers believe to be private. And it potentially places the company in violation of U.S. or European consumer protection and data privacy laws, six legal experts said.
“If you’re telling customers that you’re giving them one thing, but instead giving them something else, then that seems like a paradigm case of a deceptive business practice,” said Brian Berkey, associate professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
The Reuters findings are based on interviews with dozens of chatters, models, and their agents, along with documents such as instruction guides for chatters and sex-industry research. Reuters also examined the services promoted by more than 160 agencies that manage some of OnlyFans’ most profitable creators.
An OnlyFans spokesperson said the company “provides creators with a platform to monetize their content and engage with their fan base. OnlyFans is not affiliated with and does not endorse any third party or agency.”
But OnlyFans knows or should know about creators’ use of impostors and has profited handsomely from the deception, alleges a class-action lawsuit filed in August 2023 in U.S. District Court in Illinois. OnlyFans “lines its pockets by allowing the misconduct of its most successful creators,” says the suit, which seeks more than $5 million in damages. It is one of two separate actions filed on behalf of people allegedly duped by OnlyFans chatters posing as models.
Consumer protection experts said chatters hired to impersonate OnlyFans creators could violate a U.S. law enforced by the Federal Trade Commission that prohibits companies from misleading consumers. If found in breach of the law, OnlyFans could face millions of dollars in fines or be forced to refund millions of dollars paid by subscribers.
OnlyFans didn’t respond to most of Reuters’ questions about chatters, but a company spokesperson said: “As independent content creators, each creator is empowered to manage their own business as long as it is in keeping with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.”
Responding to the Illinois lawsuit in a court filing, Fenix International, OnlyFans’ British parent company, said the platform’s terms of service make clear that creators are legally responsible for transactions with subscribers. Fenix said it bears no responsibility and its role is limited to “providing the OnlyFans platform and storing content.” It also said OnlyFans is immune from U.S. lawsuits due to a federal law that exempts websites from liability for users’ activity.
Founded in 2016, OnlyFans has 3.2 million creators, who typically earn money by charging monthly subscriptions of between $4.99 and $50 each. An even bigger money-spinner for creators is direct messages: They can ask fans for tips that sometimes total thousands of dollars and persuade subscribers to buy extra porn tailored to their fantasies.
“This is where the real money comes from,” says Bogdan Dumitrescu, who runs the Romanian branch of U.S. agency Adult Media Promotion, which manages dozens of OnlyFans models and chatters. OnlyFans’ cut from tips and payments for custom-made porn accounted for slightly more revenue than subscriptions in 2022, according to its most recent corporate filings.
Agencies proliferated during the isolating shutdowns of the coronavirus pandemic. They typically sign up young women with the purpose of turning them into top OnlyFans models. Some agencies charge a flat fee, but most work on commission, taking 20% to 80% of a model’s total earnings. Many of these models, assisted by chatters, are now among the big earners on the site.
Reuters spoke with 15 chatters who said creators and agencies instruct them to perpetuate the fiction that they’re OnlyFans porn stars. They described how they target lovelorn or sex-starved men and use deflection, gaslighting and other tactics to deal with subscribers who question their identity. Many chatters operate from the Philippines, low-wage countries in Europe and parts of the U.S.
“We’re creating a fantasy world for these men,” said Maica Versoza, 30, who runs a chatting operation with her husband in the Philippines city of Bacolod. She said the key is to build a relationship with subscribers and “make them feel wanted.”
A male chatter, Ani Akpan, said he has worked for four agencies and impersonated “countless” female OnlyFans models, coaxing even reluctant spenders into parting with thousands of dollars. “The best thing is to just tell the person to spoil you more,” said the 32-year-old Nigerian, a former soccer coach who now lives in the Philippines.
OnlyFans’ website says the company rigorously vets creators’ identities and forbids “misleading or deceptive conduct.” But it says nothing about vetting the agencies and chatters who can have a huge emotional and financial impact on subscribers like Kunz. The OnlyFans spokesperson wouldn’t confirm or deny the existence of chatters on the platform.
Chatters have access to intimate material fans sometimes share – from naked photos and descriptions of sexual fantasies to details about their jobs and families, and even their real names.
OnlyFans’ website says it is “committed to protecting the personal data” of its users. But it doesn’t mention that subscriber information can be spread far and wide with chatters and agencies.
“You have this expectation of privacy and confidentiality that you think is there and it’s not,” said Robert Carey, a Phoenix-based lawyer who on July 29 also filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in central California. His suit targeted OnlyFans and nine agencies for what it called “chatter scams.”
“You might be talking about your wife, your girlfriend, your loneliness. Stuff that’s embarrassing,” he said. “That information is going all over the place and you have no idea.”
OnlyFans could not immediately be reached for comment on the lawsuit.
To some subscribers, OnlyFans provides a remedy for the loneliness of the online age. The company claims to offer something more meaningful than the free porn that saturates the internet: a chance to interact with its creators for companionship and even intimacy. In a TEDx talk in 2023, CEO Keily Blair described OnlyFans as a “real community based on a real two-way connection” between creators and users.
Kunz, however, said the people who impersonated the woman of his dreams left him so devastated that he had to seek therapy and take time off work.
“We had a really close relationship,” he told Reuters. “I trusted her.” He even tattooed her birthdate over his heart – “at least what I believe is her birthdate.”
Angry and hurt, Kunz embarked upon a mission. He sought to reconnect with Nikki, who he still had feelings for, and confront OnlyFans about the deceptive use of chatters.
Along the way, something unexpected happened: He became a chatter himself.
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