How sex-traffickers are using OnlyFans to make money out of sex slaves

OnlyFans has created a $1.3bllion porn industry with household names Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips among its biggest stars.

The platform has turned Bonnie and Lily, both of whom went viral for bedding dozens of men in less than a day, from amateur adult content creators to successful porn stars who rake in millions of dollars each year.

But an investigation has now uncovered how OnlyFans is also used by sex traffickers to abuse and exploit women, some of whom are enduring sexual slavery in ordinary-looking homes in quiet American communities.  

The alleged victims – who were in some cases the fiancé or girlfriend of their abuser – say they were deceived, drugged, raped, beaten and terrorized by sex traffickers. 

The platform faced massive scrutiny after influencer Andrew Tate was accused in a sex-trafficking scheme in Romania that allegedly forced women to make porn on OnlyFans.

Now a wide-ranging investigation suggests sex trafficking and abuse is common on the platform with Reuters identifying 11 cases of women who told authorities or filed lawsuits saying they had been forced to perform sex acts on OnlyFans. 

Experts warn the true prevalence of sex trafficking on the platform is nearly impossible for outsiders to assess because the accounts of most content creators are hidden behind a subscription-based paywall, minimizing the likelihood that traffickers will be caught and prosecuted. 

OnlyFans, which has become hugely successful since its inception in 2016 and is famous for porn, says it empowers content creators, particularly women, to monetize sexually explicit images and videos in a safe online environment. 

The alleged perpetrators, mostly men, filmed in private settings and sometimes were held their victims captive for a year or more, the seven-part investigation by Reuters found. 

Their trafficking enterprises relied on intimidation, violence or false assurances of love to press women into porn and keep them producing.  

Austin Koeckeritz, 31, held a young woman captive in his western Wisconsin home for nearly two years, during which he assaulted her and forced her to record sex acts on OnlyFans, prosecutors say.

The victim met Koeckeritz on Facebook in August 2020, when she was just 19 years old, and thinking they were in love, moved in with him within a week, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Wisconsin.

But he quickly isolated her from her loved ones and turned violent, beating and raping her. By January 2021, Koeckeritz began forcing her to perform commercial sex acts online for eight to 12 hours per day, six days a week

The woman earned more than $422,000 from selling sexually explicit content of herself on OnlyFans and other sites, according to financial records filed by prosecutors in court. 

Koeckeritz funneled those earnings into bank accounts that he controlled, giving her just $2,000, prosecutors said.

The abuse continued for over 18 months, until she finally escaped in August 2022 following an investigation by the FBI and local police. 

Koeckeritz, who described himself on a blog as ‘a business owner, an artist, and a student of psychology’, is serving a 20-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to sex trafficking. 

The woman says she remains tormented by the abuse she endured and said she blames not just her abuser but also the porn sites themselves, including OnlyFans.

‘The online porn industry truly does bring out the worst in people even in ways I didn’t even think possible,’ she said.

According to the US Attorney’s Office, Koeckeritz also forced a minor victim to engage in commercial sex acts between October 2021 and January 2022. 

In some cases, the trafficking went beyond the domestic exploitation of a single partner and involved more complex operations with multiple victims, according to allegations in court records. 

Married couple Jonathan Ruiz and Charline Santiago ran a six-state trafficking and prostitution operation before their arrest in a tidy Ohio neighborhood where they were raising two children, according to an indictment and other court records.

Ruiz and and Santiago conspired to violently traffick multiple women in their mid-twenties between February 2020 and February 2021, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York. 

Ruiz forced women to make porn for OnlyFans and used the platform to arrange sexual encounters with clients. Prosecutors say he created the online accounts without the women’s consent or knowledge, and that his victims did not receive any of the proceeds.

He would advertise the women online and drive them to hotels and other locations across New York City, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut and Massachusetts to engage in sexual acts.

The couple skipped from one state to the next to evade detection, according to the court records. 

Ruiz allegedly beat the women if they slept on the job or refused to obey orders, leaving them with cuts and bruises. He drugged them to keep them awake, withheld food if they didn’t work enough, and confiscated their identification documents to stop them from fleeing, the records said.

Ruiz pleaded not guilty to sex and labor trafficking, conspiracy,  and promoting prostitution. Santiago, however, pled guilty in November 2024 to charges of attempted sex trafficking, promoting prostitution.

On its website, OnlyFans says it prohibits prostitution and ‘modern slavery,’ which includes human trafficking and forced labor. It says its moderators review all content on the site and are trained to identify and report suspected trafficking. 

OnlyFans has led ‘a focus on safety for people in the adult content space,’ CEO Keily Blair said during a panel discussion in March 2024.

Under company rules, creators must have written consent from everyone in their content. But until November 2022, they didn’t have to show that proof of consent to OnlyFans before the platform allowed their content to be posted, according to Blair’s recent statements to a UK parliamentary committee. 

The company now checks for proof of consent before allowing content to go live. But at least one woman has claimed that she was terrorized and forced to film sex videos for OnlyFans after the new rule was adopted. 

The woman, from Arkansas, told police that beginning in 2023 her boyfriend Michael Hall forced her to film porn for hours on end. She claimed that if she resisted he ‘would physically attack her,’ according to an arrest affidavit filed by a police.

Hall, 32, a porn actor known as Apollo Stone, allegedly made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling pornography that depicted legal-age girls acting like teenagers.

He pleaded guilty to attempted human trafficking, two counts of aggravated assault and terroristic threatening last year.

He was sentenced to four months in jail and is not allowed to film, participate in, direct, or upload, sell, or buy pornography for 10 years, KNWA reported. He also cannot solicit anyone to participate in pornography.

Hall was released from custody after serving 120 days and given a suspended sentence, but on January 22, 2025 was arrested again after for allegedly violating various terms and conditions of his release, the US Marshals Service reported.

Hyper-macho social media phenomenon and self-professed misogynist Andrew Tate gained international attention after being implicated in a sex-trafficking scheme that allegedly used OnlyFans to rake in money.

Prosecutors in Romania say Tate and his brother Tristan, both former kickboxers with US and British citizenship, lured seven women with promises of romance, forced them to perform sex acts on OnlyFans, and then pocketed the profits. 

Tate once described the platform as ‘the greatest hustle in the world.’

The brothers were charged in June 2023 with human trafficking and forming a gang to sexually exploit women. Andrew Tate was also charged with rape. They deny the allegations.

A first criminal case had failed in December when the Bucharest Court of Appeals ruled against Andrew Tate on trial and sent the case back to prosecutors. 

Last month, a Romanian court lifted a house arrest order against Andrew Tate, replacing it with a lighter preventative measure pending the outcome of a criminal investigation.

He was under house arrest after August when prosecutors started a second criminal investigation against him, his brother Tristan, and four other suspects. 

A woman in the US accused internet personalities Tristan and Andrew Tate of conspiring to coerce her into sex work, luring her to Romania and defaming her after her testimony to Romanian authorities, according to a lawsuit filed earlier this month.

The civil complaint in Florida was reported earlier by the New York Times, which said it marked the first suit against the brothers to be filed in the United States.

The Tate brothers have been fighting civil and criminal cases in Romania and Britain.

According to the Financial Times, US President Donald Trump’s administration brought up his case with Romanian authorities earlier this month, calling for Bucharest to return the passports of both Tate and his brother Tristan.

Four women, who are bringing a civil case against Tate at the High Court in the UK accusing him of rape and coercive control between 2013 and 2016, have urged Washington not to get involved.

‘We hope that the Romanian and the UK authorities will be left alone to do their jobs,’ the alleged victims said in a statement, saying any relaxation of the travel restrictions would allow the brothers to flee justice.

Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said the US has ‘not made any requests’ over the brothers’ ‘legal situation’.

But Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu confirmed Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell raised Tate’s case with him at the Munich Security Conference last week, Romanian media reported.

Tate moved to Romania years ago after first starting a webcam business in the UK.

He lept to fame in 2016 when he first appeared on the UK’s Big Brother reality television show, but was removed after a video emerged showing him attacking a woman.

He then turned to social media platforms to promote his often misogynistic and divisive views on how to be successful.

The high-profile cases against the Tate brothers have underscored concerns among online safety groups about the potential for exploiting women on OnlyFans. And, according to prosecutors, the Tates have spawned Romanian imitators.

In June 2023, Vlad Obuzic and three other men were arrested in what a source at Romania’s anti-organized crime prosecuting unit, or DIICOT, told Reuters was ‘a carbon copy of the Tate model.’

Prosecutors said the men also used false romantic promises, threats and violence to make the women create porn for an adult platform, which the DIICOT source identified as OnlyFans. 

Some women were forced to tattoo the suspects’ names or faces on their bodies, or words such as ‘toy’ or ‘dog,’ according to a filing by the judge summarizing the charges.

‘The victims were gradually brought to a position of inferiority, mental dependence and obedience,’ said the filing, which described Obuzic’s ability to ‘identify vulnerable people and exploit their need for affection, trust and stability.’

Obuzic has described the Tates in online videos as mentors and ‘very good friends.’ He offered his own online ‘playboy’ guide in which he boasted of having ‘more hoes in the trenches. Onlyfans, webcam. Numerous girls with my portrait tatted on their skin.’

Prosecutors said Obuzic’s 18-month operation began in 2021 and involved seven women. They said he and his ‘soldiers’ made the equivalent of $2.6million from posting the women’s content on OnlyFans and ‘kept almost all the money.’

The men were indicted in October 2023 on charges of human trafficking and forming an organized crime group. They have denied the charges. Their trial is pending. 

‘Prosecutors must prove the accusations,’ said Dumitru Badragan, Obuzic’s lawyer. Lawyers for his co-defendants could not be reached.

Prosecutors believe Tate and Obuzic made their millions exploiting dozens of women. 

A federal sex-trafficking lawsuit filed last August accused ex-reality TV personality and porn star Brittanya Razavi of manipulating and coercing financially desperate women into making porn for OnlyFans, and then stealing most of the profits.

Fenix International, OnlyFans’ British parent company, is also named as a defendant in the suit, and accused of having ‘a business partnership’ with Razavi that ‘facilitated her exploitation’ of the two women.

One of the women was a Las Vegas showgirl when the pandemic struck and made her jobless, according to the suit. The other was an immigrant who had been kicked out of her adopted home as a teenager.

Razavi ‘groomed’ both of them, finding them places to stay and making ‘extravagant promises of fast-cash and ultimately, wealth and fame if they would create OnlyFans content under her management,’ according to the suit. One of the women looked to Razavi as ‘a mother figure.’

The suit alleges Razavi used the women’s IDs and social security numbers to set up OnlyFans accounts that only she could access, then plied them with alcohol to get them to perform sex acts on camera, sometimes with others. 

When they resisted, Razavi told them, ‘I’ll just talk to you again when you’re drunk’, according to the complaint. The suit also alleges one of the women was raped while intoxicated and the video was posted online.

The women’s OnlyFans accounts generated more than $1.3million in revenue, of which OnlyFans took its customary 20 per cent cut, said the suit.  

The rest was funneled into bank accounts controlled by Razavi, who paid the women about 10 per cent of their share and not the 50 per cent she had promised, the suit said.

Razavi’s lawyer ‘categorically’ denied the allegations in a statement to Reuters last year.

OnlyFans did not respond to DailyMail.com’s requests for comment. The company is not charged in any of the cases described in this story.

OnlyFans was not the only platform cited in the sex trafficking cases, but its popularity and generous terms make it potentially lucrative. Creators on the site collect 80 per cent of the revenue their accounts generate. OnlyFans gets the rest.

Websites accused of hosting sex trafficking face legal risks. At least a dozen lawsuits have been filed under US federal anti-trafficking statutes against social media companies and other sites since 2019, accusing them of profiting from sexually abusive content. 

The companies have said they’re shielded from civil and criminal liability by a federal law designed to safeguard free speech, but Congress has passed legislation in recent years to chip away at those protections.

• For confidential support, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or visit www.humantraffickinghotline.org