A proposed class action lawsuit alleges OnlyFans has blatantly deceived certain subscribers who, unbeknownst to them, communicate with paid “chatters” hired by the social media platform and/or management parties to impersonate content creators, and not the creators themselves.
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The 127-page OnlyFans lawsuit says that although many subscribers pay for the privilege to communicate directly with specific content creators on a personal—and sometimes intimate or romantic—level, the platform is, in reality, rife with “fleets of chatters” brought on by so-called management agencies, often from the Philippines or Venezuela.
The apparent chatters come at a low cost for the self-styled management agencies and can convince paying subscribers that they are actually engaged in real communication with a particular content creator, the proposed class action lawsuit summarizes, noting that OnlyFans’ marketing hinges on the “core promise” of authentic personal interactions between fans and creators.
“The problem is: unbeknownst to most Fans on the site, the use of chatters creates an experience that is almost as far from ‘really real’ as you can get—an experience orchestrated by agencies, such as the Defendants in this lawsuit, who promise to help Creators effectively make money in their sleep by signing up subscribers at scale and keeping subscribers engaged by (fraudulently) maintaining the ‘personal’ relationships Fans believe they have with Creators.”
In addition to the alleged “blatant deception and fraud” described above, the complaint says the “chatter scams” on OnlyFans involve “massive breaches of confidentiality” and severe privacy violations given that the communications at issue often involve intimate subject matter and private and/or personal information about fans, including photos and videos that “are distributed and/or accessible to numerous unauthorized parties.”
OnlyFans not only knows about the agencies behind the so-called chatter scams but has co-hosted events with at least one such perpetrator, the filing alleges. OnlyFans also knows that its use of paid chatters “blatantly violates many of its platform rules and policies,” yet the company fails to enforce those regulations to facilitate—and profit from—the widespread fraud, the complaint charges, noting that OnlyFans takes a 20-percent cut of everything a creator earns on the platform.
The lens through which the allegations in the lawsuit are presented is one rooted in “a time of increasing concern about loneliness as a serious public health issue,” the suit says. In response, OnlyFans, which has come to be known almost exclusively for the sexually explicit content on the platform, purports to offer fans a more personal connection to content creators, “or at least that’s the idea that OnlyFans is selling,” the case reads.
“Indeed, the promise of a personal connection explains why Fans have flocked to the OnlyFans accounts of many ‘traditional’ pornography stars—even though those same stars are featured in hundreds of videos that are accessible elsewhere for free,” the complaint shares.
Ultimately, paid chatters on OnlyFans are trained to “exploit emotional connections” via “manipulative tactics that prey on psychological biases and vulnerabilities,” the suit alleges. These chatters “never reveal that they are not the actual Creators,” and “confirm their impersonation” should they be questioned, the filing states.
Named as defendants in the OnlyFans lawsuit are Fenix International Limited, Fenix Internet LLC, Boss Baddies LLC, Moxy Management, Unruly Agency LLC (doing business as Dysrpt Agency), Behave Agency LLC, A.S.H. Agency, Content X, Verge Agency and Elite Creators LLC.
The OnlyFans class action lawsuit looks to cover all individuals in the United States who had a fan account on OnlyFans and paid premium content fees to any creator who was represented by any of the agency defendants, and that agency defendant used chatters to communicate directly with the fan on OnlyFans within the applicable statute of limitations period.
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