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OnlyFans owner Fenix International has been fined just over £1mn by the UK’s media watchdog over failures in providing accurate and complete age verification information for a site extensively used for adult content.

Ofcom on Thursday found Fenix had “contravened its duties” after failing in two statutory information requests, and took more than 16 months to discover it had provided inaccurate information to the regulator.

Earlier this year, Ofcom dropped part of the investigation looking at whether the subscription streaming platform had risked allowing children to access adult material after an age-checking error.

But in a separate strand of the probe — that OnlyFans may have “failed to provide complete and accurate” information to the media regulator — it found against the online adult site.

Ofcom said Fenix was a large, well-resourced company “which is well aware of its regulatory obligations”.

OnlyFans generated $6.6bn to the content creators who use its platform as a means of reaching their “fans” in 2023 — often in the adult entertainment industry — and made more than $630mn for its owner, Ukrainian-American entrepreneur Leonid Radvinsky.

Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s enforcement director, said: “Receiving accurate and complete information is fundamental for Ofcom to do its job as a regulator and to understand and monitor how platforms are operating.”

OnlyFans scans users’ faces with technology provided by a government-approved service, Yoti, to estimate age. In June 2022 and June 2023, Ofcom sought information from Fenix on the age assurance measures it had in place for OnlyFans, including how it was implementing age checks and the effectiveness of its third-party facial estimation technology.

Fenix told Ofcom it had directed its third-party provider to set a threshold of 23-years-old — five years above the 18-year-old minimum in case users appeared older than their actual age.

However, Fenix found out last year from its technology provider that the age for OnlyFans had been set at 20-years-old since November 2021. OnlyFans said at the time that it had “proactively” reported the problem to Ofcom after discovering an error caused by a “coding configuration issue”.

OnlyFans said it recognised the importance of providing the regulator with accurate and timely information and it welcomed “the conclusion of this process and Ofcom’s previous decision to close their investigation into our age assurance measures”.

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