Is OnlyFans Catfishing Its Users?

Babes in Toyland charity events are, perhaps, the premier gatherings for people who love both pornography and philanthropy. One of those, held in August 2021 at Avalon, a club in West Hollywood, raised money on behalf of For the Troops, which sends care packages to members of the armed forces. One fan bought a ticket to see a few of his favorite performers and models, including porn actress Kayley Gunner, a former sergeant who used the Army’s health care plan to pay for her boob job before choosing not to re-enlist in favor of making adult content. The fan — who unsurprisingly asked that I don’t give his name — had ordered a whiskey and Diet Coke at a small bar on the side of the club when he spotted Gunner. He’d met her before at a porn expo and had chatted with her extensively when she first started as a webcam model. After complimenting her on her ascent in the adult industry and asking if she’d gotten back to her home state of Hawaii lately, he smoothly segued to the boots. 

He had gifted her knee-length snakeskin boots, which were on her Amazon Wish List, and wondered if any adult film directors had let her wear them in a scene yet. Unfortunately, as much as she enjoyed wearing the boots, they had not. So the fan suggested that he pay her to make a custom video for him in which she wore the boots, said his name and enjoyed herself in a manner they were both comfortable discussing at a bar. “I thought it would be a cool personal thing that no one else would have and no one could download,” he says. According to him, she told him to message her on OnlyFans to set up the details. 

A couple of days later, he did just that. But on OnlyFans, Gunner denied ever meeting him and, more oddly, even knowing about the boots. When he sent a photo of them together at the event, she didn’t message back for a long time. To him, this was confirmation that he was messaging not with Gunner, but with a ghost sext writer. Gunner did not respond to requests for comment.

“I’m not an idiot,” says the fan. “I never thought I was in a relationship with these girls or that they cared about me. I’ve been to strip clubs many times. They act like they’re attracted to you so you’ll go in the back and spend money. OnlyFans was the same thing. It’s not real.” 

There has long been money to be made in the space between lying and pretending. Studio publicists in the silent age invented relationships between top stars. Celebrities have assistants respond to fan letters. Also inhabiting this milieu: magicians, pro wrestlers and the airline representative who is initially an artificial intelligence bot with a name, and then if you switch to a phone call, talk to a woman under 40 with a thick accent who claims her name is Jennifer. 

But the Gunner/boot fan thought OnlyFans had gone too far on the lying side.

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So did enough other people that in late July of this year, the law firm Hagens Berman filed a class action suit in California federal court against OnlyFans and eight agencies that represent models on the site, claiming fraud. Specifically, the suit alleges that OnlyFans allows a vast market of chatters who take shifts pretending to be models and conducting extensive, long-term intimate relationships with users. The complaint begins, “Romance scams have existed for a long time …”

Hagens says that while the case probably won’t go to trial for at least two years, it will seek billions in damages. OnlyFans is being represented by Skadden, the white-shoe 76-year-old New York law firm that is the sixth largest in the world by revenue. In success, not only could the case cost OnlyFans a significant financial sum, it could seriously alter its business model, if not its existence. “I don’t think it puts the company at risk,” says plaintiff lawyer Michella Kras. “OnlyFans has a very easy fix: disclose to its users that they may be talking to chatters. It may reduce its revenue going forward but certainly won’t end the company.”

OnlyFans was launched in 2016, the same year as TikTok, amid a period of disintermediation and tearing down institutions. By connecting models directly with fans, it made top performers wealthier than any form of pornography before it; scenes on porn sites, which can easily be viewed for free, are now little more than marketing for OnlyFans accounts. The top 10 creators on OnlyFans make between $1 million and $20 million a month. Last year, 305 million registered users spent $6.6 billion on OnlyFans to interact directly with content creators. Some of them aren’t sex workers, like the confusedly named comedian Whitney Cummings. Most are. OnlyFans was wildly scalable. There are more than 2 million models on the site, each paying 20 percent to the company, thereby making its majority owner, Leonid Radvinsky, the 347th richest American with $3.8 billion, according to Forbes. 

A little less than half of the creators’ OnlyFans income comes from subscription charges, ranging from $5 to $50 per month. A slightly bigger percentage is made by selling custom videos, asking for tips and charging to chat. Like so much else in the gig economy, being a porn star became a sales job. 

But being a retail salesperson, which is the core of being an OnlyFans model, is not scalable. If you have tens of thousands of fans sending you messages, it’s hard to upsell them videos in a timely manner, which is a key factor in a business constantly challenged by tumescence.

The only way to keep up with rising demand for your business is to hire staff. On OnlyFans, models do that by signing up with an agency, which often takes 40 percent of their earnings. (It’s possible that agencies are making nearly as much as OnlyFans itself.) The agency manages a model’s entire OnlyFans account, using software such as Supercreator, which maintains a vault of its premade “custom” videos sorted by category and price; stock phrases to cut and paste in chats; facts about the model; the sales history of each subscriber; and a database of personal details each user has revealed. They’re not dissimilar from the databases used by high-end restaurants, only in addition to your birthday and spouse’s name, they replace “doesn’t like olives” with “has a thing for feet.” 

With an agency, there can be many “Kayley Gunners” sending personal messages to all of her fans 24 hours a day, upselling each one personally. 

To keep up with rising demand for your business, you need to employ the efficiencies of globalization. So agencies exported the loneliness of men from rich countries and imported workers in poorer countries to talk to them. On sites such as Upwork and the Reddit thread r/OnlyFansChatter, people in the Philippines post impressive credentials to work as chatters for models. For $4 an hour, they’ll chat with 20 subscribers at a time, taking a 20 percent commission for anything they can sell. After an eight-hour shift, they’ll hand their leads to the next chatter. It’s Glengarry Glen Toss. 

On Upwork, one can see unbelievably detailed résumés of chatters. One has a deck showing past sales and chats and a bar chart of his skills: a 95 percent in English Writing, an 80 percent in Manipulation, a 90 percent in Gaslight and a 90 percent in Girl Friend Experience. His expertise includes “Authentic Engagement.” Another chatter, showcasing her work with a model, listed under “Project Description”: “My role was to build rapport, entertain fans and sell them PPV contents via messages. More importantly, selling them the dream of having an influencer girlfriend.”

After I started looking into this story, I spent a month trying to convince models to let me be their chatter for a day, but each time one agreed, she’d renege a few days later. No one would even admit to using chatters on the record. When I subscribed to Gunner’s OnlyFans account, she responded just seven minutes later with: 

“Hey there Joel :> welcome…im glad u found me here what can i do for you?”

I responded: “So much! I’m a reporter for The Hollywood Reporter and I’m writing an article about chatters. Are you a chatter? If so, can you tell me about your job? Will you do it if I tell you that it turns me on?”

“what do you mean? lmao ”

“There’s no need to laugh your ass off about this. Many of the top models on OnlyFans use agencies and chatters, often in the Philippines. If you are a chatter, I’d love to know about your job. If you’re Kayley, I’d love to talk to you about the chatter business. Thanks!”

“talk to someone else  You are not making any sense right now!” 

I was then blocked from Gunner’s chat. 

I had a similar experience with the actress and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Denise Richards, who is making $2 million a month on the site, at least according to In Touch Weekly. I’ve known her publicist for many years, but she told me Richards was busy in production and traveling and might not have time to talk. So I messaged Richards on OnlyFans. She got right back to me:

“I normally don’t start off by revealing this much but I wanted to try something different with you Joel.” 

Then she asked me for $29.33 to unlock a photo. Instead, I asked her about chatters. She said she didn’t know what they were. So I explained. She responded: 

“Oh no i’m a little older and old school so I like to do everything myself and keep certain personal things to myself” 

When I asked her how she kept up with all her fans messaging her, she responded:

“If you want more details first send me a $25 tip”

Although I did not tip her $25, she did get back to me the next day with a blurred picture and said, “Don’t open this if you’re in front of your fam” and asked me for $15. A few hours later, she sent me a rose emoji.

I reached out to about 10 models, 10 agencies and a half-dozen chatters and asked for interviews. No one got back to me. The closest I got was from Carmen Electra after I paid her $22.22 for a month for chatting before finding out I had to send a minimum tip of $5 per text. After paying the $27.22 to ask her about chatters, she sent a generic sales pitch about a live lesbian show she was performing with her friend, Drea de Matteo, who told Nightline she makes more some months on OnlyFans than she did per episode of The Sopranos.

Some OnlyFans models are also on SextPanther, a modern version of a phone sex line. Instead of incentivizing models to sell pictures or videos, it tries to keep them engaged at $1 to $5 per text (or $10 to $20 per minute on video calls). “When the company was launched 10 years ago, chatters were not on my mind. But lately, it’s been a point of contention at the company,” says CEO and founder Alex Guizzetti. “There’s a temptation to say, ‘Fuck it, the money is still great, the users don’t care or know enough.’ But that’s not something we’re interested in.” So he onboards models by telling them not to use chatters and polices them by monitoring user complaints and the occasional slip-up, like when a Filipino chatter forgets to hide his VPN. He says he’s getting business from OnlyFans users and models who are unhappy with the OnlyFans chatter model. “These agencies lock creators into contracts and then burn out the users in a three-month revenue play. They do things that the creators would never do, like ‘race play.’ And the creators will try to get out of it and they’ll say, ‘You’re contractually in this for a year so you can’t get your passwords back.’ ”

Some agencies are bypassing chatters and using artificial intelligence to ghost-sext for their models. Botly and Flirtflow are AI companies specifically built for OnlyFans models. Botly’s website says it’s AI chatters can “build mutual trust, get to know your fans and set the stage for deeper connections.” Flirtflow’s site states it “fosters authentic connections.” While OnlyFans doesn’t ban the use of chatters, it doesn’t permit AI. One workaround, for the porn agencies that care enough to work around, is to have AI write a mass of texts and then have a human press the send button.

Plaintiff lawyer Kras, who says she still hasn’t been on OnlyFans, was initially skeptical about the subscribers’ claims of damages. “I was like, ‘Go talk to real women,’ ” she says. “Then I listened to some of their stories. A lot of this [chatting] happened during the pandemic, and people were lonely. They told these models some very personal things. Some of them discussed problems they were having with their spouse. And they were talking to Joe Shmoe in the Philippines.” And, thanks to a popular service where models rate users’ genitals (“Carmen Electra” messaged me rates of $10 to do it over text and $85 as a voicemail), Joe Schmoe, or the agency that employs him, may have some very personal user information. Specifically, a picture of their penis. According to the complaint, one of the agencies “messaged subscribers of OnlyFans while pretending to be [the Creators] and solicited pictures of subscribers’ penises in exchange for payment, without [the Creators’] consent or knowledge.” This despite the fact that OnlyFans CEO, Keily Blair, is a lawyer who specialized in data privacy and said in a TedX talk last year that her company creates a “real community based on a two-way dialogue.” 

OnlyFans declined to comment, citing its “policy of not commenting on pending litigation.” Skadden didn’t return any of my emails. 

However, Mike Stabile, the director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition, the lobby for the adult industry, thinks the lawsuit is nonsense. First of all, an upcoming survey his company, SWR Data, did of 400 adult creators shows that only 5 percent of models use chatters, though that is somewhat misleading, since the top 1 percent earn a third of all income on the site, while the average model makes about $100 a month. (Kras says the plaintiffs don’t yet have data about how many OnlyFans models employ chatters, but it’s something they will seek to learn in discovery.)

Far more importantly, Stabile says, no one who receives a response in five minutes at 3 a.m. from a model with 100,000 followers is being catfished any more than a mom who hires Elsa for her kid’s party and doesn’t get Idina Menzel. “The people you’re talking to are not the real people, not because they’re chatters, but because they’re fictional. You’re paying someone whose name is fictional, who is portraying a character. This is entertainment. You’re paying to role play that you’re talking to this person. You don’t go to Universal Studios and say, ‘I’m not in Hogwarts?! I thought I was going to Hogwarts!’ ” 

He’s got a point. Would you sue a 1990s phone sex service because the person you paid $1.99 a minute wasn’t the model in the newspaper ad and wasn’t doing to herself what she claimed to be doing to herself? Bolstering Stabile’s point: The class action complaint states that two of the five named plaintiffs “did not stop using his OnlyFans account after learning of the Chatter Scams through the present litigation.”

The other reason the suit makes him so angry, he says, is because it seeks to weaponize the misogyny some men have about their perceived lack of power with adult performers who are already harassed and threatened constantly. One OnlyFans user I spoke to who had gotten in touch with the class action suit’s law firm was a self-professed men’s activist who spent $500 to get a model to admit he was really a chatter because he feels that men are being exploited. 

Worse yet, Stabile, a former editor of Gay Porn Blog, says the stories about chatters —including this one — always seem to mention that men are impersonating women. “It’s some man in the Philippines and you’re having sex with him and you’ve been polluted. It’s a little gay panic,” he says. 

Maybe it’s also a bigger panic. That we are on the precipice of abandoning human connection. We text people for days on dating sites and then never meet, have co-workers we’ve only met on Zoom, get food delivered outside our locked doors and enter public spaces with earbuds in so no one can approach us. A five-minute video where someone says our name while wearing the snakeskin boots that we bought them is five minutes where we were acknowledged. And if we can’t get to those five minutes, detoured by chatters and bots that steal them, then we really have become caged by machines. To break us free, we need a hero. Our nation turns yet again to you, Kayley Gunner. 

***

I’m Just Here for the Jokes, I Swear

OnlyFans is aggressively pursuing and pushing its non-adult entertainers, from comics to boxers.

When OnlyFans approached comedian Whitney Cummings in 2022 about joining its site, she saw freedom. OnlyFans has no app. You can’t search for creators on the site. You have to subscribe to see anything. It’s a place, she realized, only for your fans. 

If she posted jokes behind that big a wall, she’d be protected from the backlash she got on social media from haters who posted her jokes either out of context or, worse yet, in the right context that they were offended by anyway. Plus, posting on YouTube required her to scrub out words such as “QAnon” from her jokes so the channel wouldn’t demonetize her. So after putting her last two specials out on Netflix, Cummings released her 2023 special, Mouthy, on OnlyFansTV, the company’s nudity-free site. She then produced two Friar’s Club-style roasts on OnlyFansTV, one in which comics destroyed her and one in which they insulted the often-shirtless comic Bert Kreischer. 

When the company approached comedian Jiaoying Summers two years earlier, she just saw a chance to make money. After OnlyFans assured Summers that they were only interested in her for her personality, she met with the CEO and COO at her godmother’s restaurant, Xi’an Beverly Hills. Summers convinced them to sponsor a live comedy show she hosted that included comic Matt Rife. “Everyone on the show had to start an OnlyFans account, and we got paid handsomely to do it,” Summers says. Since then, she says she’s made $1 million on the site by posting her podcast episodes a few days before they’re publicly released and by making her fans one-minute personalized roast videos. And by chatting. “I don’t look at my Instagram DMs. But my superfans will tip me $100 on OnlyFans to say hi to me. I’ll answer them,” she says. 

Like pornographers before it, OnlyFans aspires to respectability. Penthouse’s Bob Guccione got Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and Malcolm McDowell to star in his film version of Caligula; Hugh Hefner got Bob Newhart, Patty Duke and Sammy Davis Jr. on his TV show Playboy After Dark; OnlyFans signed up Bella Thorne, Cardi B, Iggy Azalea, Lily Allen, DJ Khaled, Terrell Owens, Carol Alt, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and tennis star Nick Kyrgios — all of whom quit the site shortly after signing on. But OnlyFans keeps trying. It’s sponsoring a team in the second division of Grand Prix motorcycle racing. It’s making shows on OnlyFansTV, including House of Sims, a reality show that’s now also airing on Netflix U.K., starring the family from The Only Way Is Essex (think a U.K. cross between Kardashians and Real Housewives). “Many creators joined organically, and others as a result of OnlyFans’ support of grassroots sports and entertainment, like our flagship comedy show LMAOF on OFTV,” says an OnlyFans spokesperson.

Nico Ali Walsh, a middleweight boxer who is the grandson of Muhammad Ali, was approached two years ago by OnlyFans execs about joining the site and being sponsored by it. “It was an easy choice to make. The only issue was the stigma,” he says. He shares training videos and charges $5 to find out about upcoming fights before they’re officially announced. He even wears the OnlyFans logo on his boxing shorts in the ring. “I think of it as something like Google. If someone was sponsored by Google, you wouldn’t immediately think he’s sponsored by a porn website. But that’s what a lot of people use Google for.”

As OnlyFans moves into mainstream entertainment, some of these mainstream entertainers are dipping their toes into the platform’s real raison d’être. Summers has been selling a few bikini pics on the site. “I love my body. If they want to pay $50, I don’t mind,” she says

This story appeared in the Oct. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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