Money, Child Sex Abuse, Sexual Servitude; Behind OnlyFans Booming Success

London, UK: The adult-only platform, OnlyFans, has risen to the zenith of riches in a blink. Blending the social media glitz and ever-demanding business of sex, OnlyFans created a different league of adult websites. Founded in 2016, the platform now boasts over 4 million creators and 300 million users. The website allows anyone, including celebrities, porn stars, and aspiring influencers, to post and sell sexually explicit videos of themselves. While many claimed to have made millions out of the platform, darkness on the other side of the platform weighs triple its success.

OnlyFans claims that it is building “the safest social media platform in the world.” Police reports show quite the opposite.

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Reportedly, over the last five years, more than a thousand complaints were reported to police against the platform. At least ten women complained that they are being forced to perform sex work for OnlyFans by their controlling partners, said Mirror. As per the outlet, there were 21 reported rapes where OnlyFans was mentioned, with two of the cases involving girls under 16.

There were also more than a dozen cases that refer to the involvement of individuals under 18 using OnlyFans, which is technically a breach of site rules. While there are about 1,250 reported crimes and 38 ongoing investigations, only 52 cases, which constitute 4 percent of total cases, ended up with someone being charged.

According to the report, 77 crimes were reported, which claimed that sexually explicit images and videos on the platform were shared without their consent. There were also complaints from the OnlyFans models claiming that their content has been leaked.

OnlyFans has revealed that it has had nearly 180 legal requests from UK law enforcement in the last two years.

Complaints range from raping partners, underage users, posting without permission, taping private videos without one’s knowledge or consent, and so on. One victim in South Yorkshire said they spotted their ex-partner advertising their OnlyFans on social media. After subscribing to the account, they say they found a sex tape they had made being sold for £100 without permission, as per a Mirror report.

OnlyFans said it has tightened procedures in 2020 and required consent from all who are featured in the explicit content. According to the media report, there are 27 reports of alleged blackmail or sextortion, with either the OnlyFans model or the “fan” as the alleged victim. One crime report identifies a female suspect in Cheshire who “uses” OnlyFans, “records the victim,” and “then demands £10,000 from him and threatens to share the video if he refuses.”

Over 30 percentage of the said 1,250 reported cases, shows that suspects are identified, but the victims are allegedly not supporting the police action.

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The platform traumatised many. Speaking to the Reuters news agency, a Nebraska woman said she struggled to go out in public, terrified that people might recognise her from a sex video her ex-boyfriend was selling on OnlyFans for $15. An Illinois woman said she learnt that naked images of herself were circulating from her teenage daughter, who saw them online.

An OnlyFans spokesperson told the news agency that “in the few examples where bad actors have misused our platform,” OnlyFans “removed the content swiftly, banned the user, and actively supported investigations and prosecutions.”

While claiming to have deleted the accounts in question, the actual deletion sometimes occurred a year or longer after the women complained to police.

Child Abuse

According to the news agency, 30 complaints were made to the US police regarding child sexual abuse material that appeared on the site between December 2019 and June 2024. As per the report, the case files cited more than 200 explicit videos and images of kids, including some adults having oral sex with toddlers. In one case, multiple videos of a minor remained on OnlyFans for more than a year.

Some cases accused adults of preying on minors in creating explicit content and selling it on the site. A 16-year-old girl went missing in Florida in April 2023. When parents checked her phone, hoping to find any clues, they were thwarted with shock. The girl has been sending nude photos and videos of herself to a man, whom they feared might have abducted her. When the police found her the next day, she was partially naked in a rented house with the man, according to police records. The investigation found that he had posted dozens of sexual videos and images of the girl on OnlyFans for $20. The man, Ethan Diaz, 22, was later charged with human trafficking and other offences.

Citing the police files, Reuters reported that a man used the site to send another man over 100 files featuring the abuse of children of all ages, including toddlers.

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An OnlyFans spokesperson told the news agency that it had “rigorous safety controls” and voluntarily reports all suspected cases of child sexual abuse material to the National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC, a U.S. nonprofit designated by Congress to collect and disseminate tips to law enforcement.

However, OnlyFans did not respond to the news agency’s question on how child abuse material was able to evade its monitoring and whether it has kept its revenue from accounts involving minors. None of the said cases involved any criminal charges against the website or its parent company, Fenix International. As per the report, there is no evidence that the platform has been sued or held criminally liable for child sexual abuse content.

Wyatt Maxwell, a cabaret singer, was arrested for his OnlyFans content featuring himself with a 16-year-old boy, who was being exploited. The videos were shot between 2020 and 2021. Maxwell posted nearly 20 videos on OnlyFans and a smaller rival website, JustFor.Fans, charging subscribers $15 a month on both platforms. Maxwell told a federal investigator he hauled in between $3,000 and $10,000 a month from OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans. The prosecutors said he earned more than $49,000 on OnlyFans alone.

Christopher Varney, 60, of Florida, and Abel Esquivel, 35, of San Francisco, started direct messaging on OnlyFans in August 2019, said Reuters. Esquivel paid $5 a month to subscribe to Varney’s OnlyFans account. When Varney asked Esquivel, “You have any vids of y0ung you can upload?” he used a zero instead of the letter O, possibly as code. The word “young” is sometimes flagged by porn sites as denoting possible child sexual abuse material.

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Days later, Esquivel sent Varney eight files containing videos of boys aged eight to 16. He also sent three more videos, including one that showed a man sexually assaulting a young boy grimacing in pain, as per police record. In March 2021, Esquivel sent videos and images of adults engaging in oral sex with toddlers, including one who was 18 to 24 months old, according to the case file.

How the Platform works

While major porn sites offer content for free and make money from advertising, OnlyFans made it possible to mint money from subscribers or “fans” by a monthly fee ranging between $4.99 and $50. The platform allows the creators to keep 80 percent of the payment made by subscribers. While the platform takes the rest, it is still a goldmine.

According to Fenix International, the platform’s British parent, OnlyFans’ pre-tax profit in 2022 reached $525 million—almost a hundred-fold increase in just three years. Revenue expanded at least twenty-fold to more than $1 billion, as per the Reuters report.

However, despite the high number of cases, officials said that the sheer size of OnlyFans and the paywalls surrounding its individual creators have made it nearly impossible to monitor systematically. Notably, no federal law specifically criminalises nonconsensual porn, which has caused further difficulties in monitoring.

While the platform’s CEO Keily Blair has said that “100 percent” of content is reviewed by human moderators aided by artificial intelligence, the reported complaints suggest otherwise.

According to the platform’s terms and services, creators must have documents to prove the age, identity, and consent of other people who appear in their content, unless OnlyFans has already vetted those people as creators too. However, multiple creators said during interviews that they have uploaded porn featuring others without providing that proof.