Credit card firms pose threat to OnlyFans’ business model as multiple child sex-abuse videos found on the website

For months, she’d sent nude photos and videos of herself to a man they now feared had abducted her.

“Some guy just flew in from New Jersey,” her bewildered father told police. “There’s some kind of sexual business and explicit photo… something bad.”

US police records show child sexual abuse material appeared on OnlyFans up to June 2024

The next day, sheriff’s deputies found the girl, partially naked, in a rented house with the man, according to police records.

An investigation revealed he had posted dozens of sexual videos and images of the girl on OnlyFans – and online marketplace for homemade porn. One video, advertised for $20, showed the girl penetrating herself.

“Watch me get super wild,” read the caption. The man, Ethan Diaz (22), was later charged with human trafficking and other offences. He pleaded not guilty.

OnlyFans makes reassuring promises to the public – it’s strictly adults-only, with sophisticated measures to monitor every user, vet all content and swiftly remove and report any child sexual abuse material.

“We know the age and identity of everyone on our platform,” said CEO Keily Blair last year. “No children allowed, nobody under 18 on the platform.”

This is clearly not the case. The Florida girl’s case undercuts OnlyFans’ claims. And it’s not an isolated example.

Reuters documented 30 complaints in US police records that child sexual abuse material appeared on the site between December 2019 and June 2024.

The case files cited more than 200 explicit videos and images of children, including some adults having oral sex with toddlers.

In one case, multiple videos of a minor remained on OnlyFans for more than a year, according to a child exploitation investigator.

The impact on some victims was devastating. “After I found out about the video, I couldn’t go outside without being scared somebody saw my face,” a young man told a Boston court after a film of his sexual encounter at age 15 with a volunteer football coach ended up for sale on OnlyFans.

Parents expressed outrage.

“There has to be accountability for these platforms,” the father of a 16-year-old boy from Kansas told Reuters. The family’s ordeal, he said, is “a wound that will never heal.”

In response to detailed questions from Reuters, an OnlyFans spokesperson said: “OnlyFans is proud of the work we do to aggressively target, report, and support the investigations and prosecutions of anyone who seeks to abuse our platform in this way.”

The spokesperson said OnlyFans had “rigorous safety controls” and voluntarily reports all suspected cases of child sexual abuse material to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a US non-profit designated to collect and disseminate tips to law enforcement.

OnlyFans didn’t respond to most of the questions about the cases in this story – including how child abuse material was able to evade its monitoring and who has kept the revenue earned by accounts involving children.

The US senate lambasted Meta and four other major platforms for failing to sufficiently protect children

None of the cases involved criminal charges against the website or its parent company, Fenix International. Reuters found no evidence that OnlyFans has been sued or held criminally liable for child sexual abuse content.

US free-speech protections have largely given social media platforms immunity from liability for abusive content posted by their users. But as concerns mount about online harms – particularly involving children – the US congress is seeking to toughen federal laws to hold the platforms accountable.

At a US senate hearing in January on the effects of social media, lawmakers lambasted Meta and four other major platforms for allegedly failing to sufficiently protect children.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged at the hearing to do better.

OnlyFans, which wasn’t summoned to the hearing, has been praised by sex workers for making pornography more profitable. Its 3.2m content creators typically sell explicit images and videos for a monthly subscription fee, plus one-off payments, keeping 80pc of the sales. OnlyFans takes the rest – a cut that yielded almost $1.1bn in revenue in 2022, its latest financial disclosures show.

Those subscriptions – effectively, a paywall around nearly every OnlyFans creator – make the site difficult to scrutinise. Most content is inaccessible to non-subscribers and therefore harder to find and monitor compared to platforms such as Facebook or X.

This makes creators heavily dependent on social media to drive traffic to their OnlyFans accounts. Some predators also use these mainstream sites to find minors to exploit on OnlyFans.

That’s how Diaz, the New Jersey man, allegedly ensnared the Florida girl. Her journey to OnlyFans began on Snapchat, a popular online hangout for teens, where she caught Diaz’s eye.

A Snapchat spokesperson said the platform’s “robust measures” make it “difficult for teens to be discovered and contacted by strangers”, but would not comment specifically on the case.

Diaz is awaiting trial, charged with human trafficking, multiple counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child and other crimes.

If found guilty, he faces a mandatory life sentence.

But the girl has been left scarred, the family said. “No physical injuries,” a family member said, “but emotional trauma.”

OnlyFans has made online safety central to its image.

“We moderate all of the content on our pl atform. Every text, every message, every audio clip, every livestream, everything gets moderated. We see everything,” CEO Blair said at a TEDx talk in 2023. “We’re doing it to keep our community safe.”

The company spokesperson said “the lack of anonymity and absence of end-to-end encryption on OnlyFans” allow law enforcement to investigate reports of illegal content on the site. End-to-end encryption keeps data entirely private between sender and recipient.

Some child-protection groups have praised OnlyFans. NCMEC, the US-based group, said the company participates in voluntary initiatives to detect and remove abusive content and has safety measures that some other sites don’t.

NCMEC is heavily funded by the US justice department, and said it receives no financial support from OnlyFans.

The Internet Watch Foundation, a British nonprofit focused on eradicating online child sexual abuse, calls OnlyFans “an industry leader in online safety.” It also said OnlyFans pays it stg£90,000 (€110,000) a year for services designed to detect images of child abuse.

However, in more than 120 cases in the US and 18 in Britain, adults complained that explicit material had been posted without their consent, in violation of OnlyFans rules and criminal statutes.

OnlyFans said misuse is rare.

Underage users can also slip past OnlyFans’ monitoring and post their own explicit material for sale, police records and interviews show.

For some children, bypassing age controls is a gateway to an alluring world.

OnlyFans “presents itself as a platform that provides access to influencers, celebrities and models,” said Elly Hanson, a clinical psychologist. “This is an attractive mix to many teens, who are pulled into its world of commodified sex, unprepared for what this entails.”

In addition to the police complaints of child sexual content on OnlyFans, Reuters found another 17 cases in which minors allegedly had OnlyFans accounts. For a child to possess an account violates OnlyFans’ bedrock adults-only policy.

Some children sound their own alarm.

In April 2021, a 17-year-old boy walked in to Boston police to report that a volunteer high-school football coach almost twice his age was selling a sexually explicit video of the teen on OnlyFans.

Two months later, police arrested the coach. He initially denied knowing the victim or having an OnlyFans account. But police found the video on his phone and the 36-year-old later pleaded guilty to charges of child rape, distribution of child sexual abuse material, and possession of child pornography.

He was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered not to use OnlyFans.

OnlyFans has been hit before by accusations that it doesn’t adequately protect children. In 2021, the BBC detailed several cases of explicit videos on OnlyFans involving teenagers. In response, OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix, said it closed accounts it found to have indecent images of children. ​Reports of child abuse pose a risk to the website. Mastercard, Visa and Discover have shown they will take steps when faced with allegations that their cards are used to pay for child sexual abuse videos and images.

In 2020, the card companies cut ties with Pornhub, another porn platform, after a public outcry over alleged child abuse material and other illegal content.

They stopped card payments for Pornhub’s paid content, forcing it to rely more on ads and sales of user data.

OnlyFans says it doesn’t sell user data or allow third-party ads. That leaves it dependent upon Mastercard, Visa and Discover: The website only accepts transactions with cards issued by them.

The three card companies said they still don’t accept payments from Pornhub. They didn’t comment further.

OnlyFans’ fortunes also lean heavily on other social media sites.

The platform’s search function doesn’t allow users to trawl for content; they need to already know the name of the creator they want to watch.

That’s why OnlyFans creators often advertise on social media, attracting subscribers using sexualised photos, video snippets, and hardcore porn on X.

Half of the 30 police complaints about child exploitation on OnlyFans said Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media played a role in promoting the content.

X declined to comment. Snapchat said that using its platform to promote OnlyFans, or any pornographic content, violates its policies.

Meta said Instagram doesn’t allow users to share links to porn sites – but it doesn’t consider OnlyFans to be “solely” a porn site.

Once creators have built an audience, they promote content through direct messages with subscribers. Those messages, along with all other content, are moderated, CEO Blair claimed.

In one case, however, the messaging function allowed one man to share with another 125 explicit videos and images featuring sex acts involving at least 13 children. The sharing of the files went undetected for at least seven months.

​Online child sexual abuse can be hard to investigate and prosecute.

Nearly a third of US police cases Reuters examined were closed without an arrest. In some instances, investigators couldn’t identify children who appeared on OnlyFans.

In others, they cited a lack of evidence or uncooperative witnesses.

One young woman in Florida, dropped a complaint because she said she partly blamed herself, not her adult partner, for a filmed encounter posted on OnlyFans when she was 17, records show.

Because of OnlyFans’ paywalls, investigators must rely heavily on witnesses who happen to spot child content on the site and report it to parents or police.