When Tom* got his first glimpse of Hannah in real life, he thought she was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen.
He’d already checked out her photoshoots, of course — and he’d already perused her OnlyFans page. But when he came across her at a prominent Los Angeles nightclub, he was bowled over by how beautiful she was in the flesh. And he had something specific he wanted to ask her.
“There was an item I thought she might sell,” he says, “like a specific bra she had worn. I was like: ‘Oh, that’d be cool to have.’ Because it was for a shoot she did — she’s not in the porn industry, she’s a model model, like an actual model.”
So he struck up a conversation with her. “I was like, ‘Oh, that was a really sexy bra, do you still have it? I would pay to have it as a thing in my collection.’” Although Tom concedes that the request “sounds weird in hindsight,” he adds that he’d already purchased a lot of content from Hannah’s OnlyFans page, as well a handful of other models’ pages, “and in Hannah’s case, I’ve already bought videos and photos and whatever. Like at a certain point it gets to be: what else is left to buy?”
Hannah was open to the suggestion — she said she still had the bra, and was fine with the idea of selling it — but quickly directed Tom back to her chatbox on OnlyFans. They could discuss things further on there, she said. Tom agreed, and snapped a picture with her before they both got on with their night.
Things took a turn when Tom followed her instructions, however. Back behind a screen, Hannah seemed to have no memory at all of their interaction. “What are you talking about?” he says she responded when he reminded her of their conversation. “I don’t meet people outside of OnlyFans.” She didn’t know if she even had the bra, she added. She’d have to go back through all her stuff from previous photoshoots, and there were no guarantees.
Tom was taken aback. When Hannah denied meeting him, he sent her the picture he’d taken of them together, sipping cocktails in the nightclub just days before. And then the chatbox went silent. Hours later, he got a response: Hannah did remember him after all, and she was sorry, she just responded like that because she has to be safe in her line of work.
Tom said he understood, but his suspicion was piqued. The next time he saw Hannah — and Kayley, another OnlyFans model whom he followed and had purchased a lot of content from — in one of the LA clubs, he watched what they were doing before sending a suggestive message via the OnlyFans chat. In both cases, he got an instant reply. But Hannah and Kayley were busy, ordering cocktails and chatting with friends. They certainly weren’t on their phones, offering up supposedly personalized OnlyFans content within minutes. So who was?
The answer to that question forms the crux of a class action lawsuit filed in July 2024 by the legal firm Hagens Berman, which details how OnlyFans openly allows the use of “chatters” who impersonate models and who are trained to extract as much money as possible from those models’ customers. Usually young men with proficient English who live in places like Venezuela and the Philippines, they are badly paid by U.S. standards but well-paid by the standards of their own countries — and they can earn lucrative bonuses by selling supposedly tailored content through the chatbox, all the while hooking a customer in by making them believe they’re in a personal relationship with the model.
These chatters operate in plain sight — entire chatter agencies, like Convo Bunny and Ghost Chatters (“Do you think CEOs sit replying to customer enquiries for hours a day? No, they hire people. Why treat your OnlyFans differently?”) have websites and testimonials. Job descriptions are posted on the r/OnlyFansChatter subreddit — which has 12,000 members, putting it in the top 7% of all subreddits by population size — promising “$2.50–$3.50/hr + commissions (Avg. $1,000–$1,200/month – No OF experience needed!)” or, for “elite chatters,” “$10/hr (~$4,500–$5,000/month) + High-Performance Bonuses (Minimum 2 years of chatter experience required!).”
Considering that OnlyFans takes a 20 percent cut of everything a model sells on their website and is, according to its most recent publicly filed records, making over $2 billion per year, presumably almost exclusively through that avenue, it is strongly disincentivized to stop the practice. Customers don’t pay to chat to the models, but having a personal relationship with a girl-next-door type model — as opposed to, say, watching anonymous porn — is central to OnlyFans’ allure. And inside chats, models can ask for tips or send extra content for money.
Because of this, Hagens Berman’s class action lawsuit — filed on behalf of five plaintiffs, who seek triple damages and full coverage of their legal costs — accuses OnlyFans of falsely promising “authentic” connections, rather than openly stating that chatters may operate on their platform; of knowing that chatters operate in violation of their own terms and allowing them to do so anyway; and of “a failure to enforce its own policies” that “goes beyond mere negligence and supports an inference that OnlyFans is acting intentionally to facilitate the chatter scams”; and of therefore taking men’s money under false pretenses. It also claims that the use of chatters has caused emotional harm to the plaintiffs, because many of them shared intimate images of themselves that they believed to be private between them and a model, and because some of them believed they were in personal relationships with models when they were actually being manipulated by trained chatters. The lawsuit is filed against the parent company of OnlyFans and a handful of agencies that are alleged to provide chatters to the platform.
OnlyFans was contacted by The Independent for comment and did not respond.
Robert Carey, one of the two attorneys who filed the legal complaint, says that his team has now spoken to hundreds of men who were duped by chatters and that the money lost by each individual has “ranged anywhere from, ‘Oh, I’ve spent a total of $5,000’ to, ‘I spent $70,000.’” Meanwhile, the models who can afford to hire the agencies — mostly those who are in the top 1 percent of OnlyFans earners — are regularly pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars per week by Hagens Berman’s estimates, some over a million.
“A lot of these men — especially our class reps — they fully believe that they were in these relationships with these women,” says Gloria*, a paralegal at Hagens Berman who preferred to stay anonymous because there are strong feelings about the case online, and women who are connected with OnlyFans in any manner often become the target of online harassment. “Some even went as far as buying plane tickets because they believed they were going to meet with these women in certain places — going there and then getting ghosted.
“So they’re fully invested. They’re fully invested, and they fully believe the fantasy. And a lot of them will say: ‘That might make me stupid,’ but they thought they were special. And of course, they wouldn’t have spent that much money if they had known that it was a ruse.”
What’s so insidious, Gloria adds, is that the chatters are trained specifically in how to overcome doubt if the men talking to them become suspicious: “They’ll be like: ‘No, baby. Why don’t you believe me?’ So they’ll always guilt-trip it back to him not trusting her. ‘I thought you loved me’ — they’ll use that a lot…. Basically what they do is they make them feel bad for even asking, to the point where they stop asking.”
But what about the ones who ask for some form of proof? “They can do that,” says Gloria. Indeed, men will often notice discrepancies in how the “model” is talking — especially if they forget key details, like a dog’s name or a major life event, because the person who’s typing is actually one of a rotating list of chatters provided by the agency — and ask for videos or photos that can prove the model is speaking in real time. Usually, the chatter agency will already have basic images or videos ready to hand for such scenarios, such as images of the model holding up one, two, three, four or five fingers so the chatter can offer that as “evidence” and then quickly send it. But sometimes the requests will get more demanding.
“They ask for videos, like: I want you to say my name,” says Gloria. That’s when the agency will reach out to the model and ask her to film the video, alleges the lawsuit — which can mean a long delay in replying. The model adds the request to her long to-do list, because she’s likely to be highly in demand. Gloria explains that’s the moment when some men realize they’ve been duped, because “it’s like: Why does it take you four or five days to do this?”
Most of the men who realize they’ve been exploited by OnlyFans chatters are too embarrassed to speak publicly about what they went through, says Robert Carey. That’s unsurprising, considering one of the most common uses of the OnlyFans chatbox is “dick ratings,” which is exactly what it sounds like.Men will send graphic photos of their genitals for in-the-moment “ratings” by models, and this sensitive material is clearly presumed to be viewed privately by the model in question. But when agencies with rotating chatters gain the logins of the models, those images can be viewed by one, or multiple, other people — few of whom resemble the model they think they’re communicating with, according to the lawsuit and chatter agencies.
It’s not just those men who would rather not be identified. The legal complaint also includes a number of men who believed they were in long-running, committed relationships with a model they met through the website, and are humiliated when they find out they’ve simply been sending money to a group of disinterested young men in the gig economy. “The one thing that struck me is you see these guys that are just ordinary, hard-working people,” says Carey, “and they drop so much coin on this, you’re just like: Whoa.”
One of the reasons that Hagens Berman’s lawsuit hasn’t progressed since July is because OnlyFans is insisting the class representatives should have their names publicly revealed, Carey says. The legal complaint was filed using just the men’s initials, though their full names are available privately to OnlyFans and their legal team. OnlyFans pushing to have those initials changed to full names is, in Carey’s opinion, an intimidation tactic aimed at trying to embarrass them into dropping the lawsuit.
Not every man is reticent about talking about their experiences, however. Some want the world to know exactly what they went through. That’s how it was for Tom, and how it is for OnlyFans customer-turned-supersleuth James*.
James, who works in IT and is based in Texas, says he realized quite early on in his OnlyFans membership that the top models weren’t always who they seemed. Like a few of the men who spoke to Robert Carey and Gloria, he became suspicious when he noticed tonal inconsistencies in the way a model would write to him. This model, who the chatbox claimed was based less than two miles away from him, offered to give him proof in the form of holding up a numbers of fingers, “so I said: OK, hold up three fingers. She holds up three fingers. I’m like: OK, do two. She did two. I’m like: OK, this is way too fast for that [and] it doesn’t look like that was taken today. And then what I would do is I would take the raw image and scrape the metadata off of it to see when it was taken and what kind of camera it was taken on. And it was about six months beforehand, or a year beforehand. So these pictures are about a year old.”
James didn’t stop there: “What I did with one of her pictures was I’d seen a sign in the background and I zoomed in and it was in German… she was in some tanning salon, I think. So I was able to pinpoint where that tanning salon was — in Berlin.” The model wasn’t based anywhere near his home in Austin, he realized. She didn’t even live in the country.
It wasn’t long before another chatter messed up, big-time. James had suspected for a while that he was sometimes receiving messages which had been coded and automatically pushed to multiple customers’ accounts, with supposedly personalized videos to unlock for cash. “There was one that I talked to where they had messed up and when they had tried to refer back to me by my pseudonym that I used on there,” he says. “So I told them: Well, my name is such-and-such. And when they typed back to me, it said {Name}, not my name. It’d be in brackets, like as if you were programming it.”
What happened next was eye-opening. “I said: ‘OK, gig is up. I know you’re a chatter. Tell me where you’re from.’ And they told me that they were a man from the Philippines and they were getting paid about eight dollars and fifty cents an hour to do this.”
James wasn’t exactly surprised by the admission, but he was surprised by some of the facts: “They said that it provides pretty well for their family. They really don’t have to do that much. You know, just talk dirty or whatever, send videos. And the more that they harvest it basically out of somebody, the more that they got from the model, ‘cause they would pay him bonuses.”
Once he’d spoken to one chatter, James decided to directly address others in top models’ chatboxes. And he was surprised how many would “just flat-out admit it, like: ‘I’m doing this for money to support my family’.” He noticed how international the chatters were, too: “I’ve met a Romanian chatter, I’ve met a Filipino chatter, I’ve met them from all over the world almost — some in Nigeria.”
Some of the men were “ashamed to do it,” he says, “because they can’t find other employment, but they have to do it to survive.” And James understood that the job must take its toll: constantly roleplaying as a horny 21-year-old American woman when you’re a middle-aged Romanian man just trying to put food on the table for your family has got to be, at the very least, psychologically weird. That’s without even thinking about the amount of graphic photos they inevitably must have to see per shift. And it seems clear from multiple posts on the r/OnlyFansChatter subreddit that models frequently fail to pay their chatters, even after the agencies have had them working for weeks.
Others, however, were “despicable people,” according to James, or people who had long forgotten about the human cost of their interactions and had turned it into a game-like strategy. “One of them that I talked to, he would do three different models at the same time… He would triple-dip so he could [maximize profits] and he had a script of what to say if somebody asked a certain thing or how to behave. If someone asks for something very time-sensitive, like someone said, ‘I want you to hold up six fingers and hold up today’s newspaper,’ then he has to get a hold of the model fast, otherwise, you know, the cover’s blown.”
James even managed to speak to enough models that he came up with his own heuristic for whether or not one might be employing chatters: “Typically, if they were smaller, they would be a one-woman show. But if they had over… 500 to 1,000 people following them, then that’s when they start hiring the chatters.”
This fact alone is why their class action lawsuit shouldn’t just concern men who have been duped out of their time and money, says Robert Carey: “I’ll tell you who the victims are really. It would be the girls who do not hire agencies, because what’s happening is there’s a finite pool of dollars that go into this, in the aggregate, and they’re taking the lion’s share of it for that small 1% or 2%. And if they had to do it manually, they could only take so many people, which would push more money back down to the other people who are doing it honestly.” In Carey’s opinion, that amounts to those bigger, more well-known models with chatter agencies “using unfair trade practices to get an outsized portion of the revenue, to the detriment of the people who aren’t doing that. And they are competitors, right? So it’s a competition fraud in some sense that’s ripping off all the girls who would get some of that overflow business if the other people were doing it legitimately.”
As for Tom — who deactivated his OnlyFans account over a year ago — he says he understands that logistically, dealing with hundreds of thousands of inbound chats is impossible. But he wishes that OnlyFans as a company had been upfront about the fact that they can’t guarantee you’re actually talking with the models in the chatbox.
He keeps in touch, in a way, with Hannah and Kayley. Hannah left LA last year and moved back to Arizona, to start a local business and be closer to her family. Tom went down to a store where she was promoting her business recently because he’s “always happy to support” her. They had a quick chat and “she knew who I was,” he says.
Kayley was at AVN — otherwise known as “the world’s biggest porn convention” — in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, which Tom traveled to attend. But he felt awkward about joining the lawsuit and talking about it publicly when he saw Kayley posing with fans. Even though he keeps himself anonymous, he still believes Kayley knows that he’s outed her. Specific details that he’s chosen to share would probably tip her off, he says — such as the fact that he once bought her an expensive pair of boots off her personal wish list for her birthday, back when he was still spending a lot of time and money on OnlyFans. After buying the boots, he asked her in person if she’d make a personalized video wearing the boots and she agreed, but told him to follow up with her about it on the site. There, a chatter told him that they had no recollection of the purchase. That was another moment that made him realize he’d never been conversing with the real Kayley online.
“I tried to keep a distance” at the convention in January, he says, “but then there was one point where she did see me and she actually gave me a really evil look.” It’s a shame, he says, because he still thinks Kayley is smart and interesting and understands why she does what she does.
“This is their livelihood,” he says. “This is how they make money. I respect women who work in this field. I don’t — look, everyone needs to make money and make a living. For me, it wasn’t about women using [chatters], because again, they need to make the most money they can, and I’m all for that. Where my problem stood was with OnlyFans, the site itself. Don’t tell us we are chatting with the actual women and lie about it.”
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