Beginning in late 2023, users idly scrolling X might have been startled by a targeted ad with an ominous message: “The OnlyFans creator you think you are talking to is LYING.” The warning was the work of Seattle-based law firm Hagens Berman, which had also set up a bare-bones website called Save the Fans. “Have you ever talked to an OnlyFans model?” it asked. “Did you expect or were you promised personal interactions? . . . She’s NOT talking to you. . . . We are working to get justice for all subscribers who have been lied to and defrauded.”
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment the public got hip to the deception baked into OnlyFans’ business model. The platform, which debuted in 2016, hosts both famous and anonymous creators who sell subscriptions to photo and video content ranging from fully pornographic to banal but suggestive—think zaftig fitness influencers doing dead lifts, or a Texan who has described herself as “your All-American, all natural blonde next door” volunteering for “Earth Day Trash Pickup.” The widespread accessibility of free online smut has devalued images of sex or nudity, but OnlyFans promises something distinct: direct engagement. Creators’ bios and official OnlyFans posts abound with references to “1 on 1 contact.” “We can chat every single day. Who knows where we’ll take this?” one reality TV star promised in a promotional video. You can send the same nude to a million subscribers, but a private conversation offered the promise of direct attention, even if just for a fleeting moment. One former fan neatly—if a bit crassly—summed up the platform’s value add: “Why would anyone go on OnlyFans in the first place, when you can get content almost anywhere (free in most cases)?”
Anyone who thinks about this for roughly the length of a single exclusive custom video might notice that the math doesn’t add up. Top creators have millions of subscribers, and some are mainstream celebrities. Cardi B was not about to pretend to care what even a tiny percentage of her fans were eating for breakfast. If the illusion was sustained longer than it should have been, surely there was an element of willful self-delusion at play. Is it any wonder that, given minimal scaffolding, men tend to swallow the fantasy of a woman who is both fantastically hot and always ready to exchange fantasies with them?
The tipping point came after a barrage of lawsuits against an OnlyFans management company called Unruly Agency and a wave of high-profile media coverage. The secret was out: many of the platform’s top creators employed third parties to help manage their interactions with fans, and these companies often either impersonated their clients or outsourced that labor to someone living in, say, Venezuela or the Philippines. “It’s a business preying on vulnerable, mostly lonely men and misleading them about the services that are being offered,” said Camron Dowlatshahi, an attorney representing two creators in their claims against Unruly. The women allege that the company used a worker, or chatter, to engage in explicitly sexual dialogue with fans behind their backs and without their consent.
It’s not just Unruly facing litigious blowback. During its not-quite decade of existence, OnlyFans has been the target of several lawsuits. This is hardly a surprise: the company’s focus on explicit content and its move-fast-and-break-things ethos leave it vulnerable to litigation. But the Hagens Berman suit is aiming higher, setting its sights on the heart of the chatter model and taking aim at both OnlyFans and the top management agencies. To do this, the firm reached for a singular statute: the RICO Act.
RICO, which stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, was passed in 1970 in order to do something very specific: dismantle the American Mafia. In recent years, though, it has become known for its absurd malleability. The law’s key innovation was in allowing prosecutors to build a single criminal case against an organization rather than an individual, enabling the introduction of otherwise-inadmissible evidence, like past criminal acts or allegations. Prosecutors have responded to this leeway by exercising it at every opportunity: RICO has lately been used in criminal court against Diddy, drug-trafficking operations, and Stop Cop City protesters in Atlanta.
One way or another, the jilted bachelors of OnlyFans would have their day in court.
RICO grew out of its author G. Robert Blakey’s observation that the structure of mob families aped that of respectable organizations: “They were the mirror image of American capitalism,” he realized. Accordingly, he fashioned RICO to attack a targeted organization’s economic underpinnings. The statute also has a civil component, which empowers private individuals to sue racketeering entities and recover three times the damages they can prove. “It’s a very, very good payday,” Oliver Rocos, one of the attorneys defending Moxy Management in this suit, told me. Beyond criminal cases, civil litigators have deployed RICO in complex business disputes and lawsuits against major companies.
“The whole reason for RICO is that you’re going after the godfather figure—the person that doesn’t get their hands bloody committing actual crime,” Jeffrey E. Grell, an expert on civil RICO, told me. “They stand back, and they have other people commit a crime on their behalf.” Picture Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone, nodding almost imperceptibly at the messengers who come and go in his study. It’s not like OnlyFans’ owner, Leonid Radvinsky, is personally catfishing some poor schlub who lives in his mom’s basement; he’s not even that catfisher’s boss’s boss. He’s just raking in the profits (enough to have allegedly promised $11 million to AIPAC in 2023). The privilege of operating at a remove from the business offers plausible deniability: “OnlyFans is kind of sitting up here, sitting in its smoky office—it’s not doing anything, it’s just providing a platform for all of these content creators to make money,” Grell said. “That’s kind of the scenario that RICO was designed to get around.”
Another twist to the Hagens Berman suit was that it was a class action. Its plaintiffs were not business competitors but customers. (It should go without saying that there are OnlyFans creators and fans of all genders and sexualities. Since this lawsuit’s anonymous main plaintiffs are all men, all of the creators mentioned in the suit are women, and the majority of chatters impersonate female creators, this piece will generalize along those lines.) “The entire publicized premise of OnlyFans is authentic direct messaging,” Robert Carey, the attorney heading up the suit, told me over email. “I’ve yet to come across a Fan who thought he was paying [for] a fantasy connection.” The scales had finally fallen from their eyes and they were livid. “This is a complete betrayal of trust,” one fan fumed in an online post. “To say that I feel violated would be an understatement.” Despite the United States’ robust litigation culture, you still can’t sue someone for breaking your heart, but things change when there’s money involved. One way or another, the jilted bachelors of OnlyFans would have their day in court.
The Girlfriend Experience
The revelations of OnlyFans’ subterfuge have spawned a glut of truly hilarious, bizarre portraits of the hustlers scheming to defraud hapless wallet holders. In GQ, a woman using the pseudonym Emma Francis dished about her time as an OnlyFans model’s ghostwriter, confessing, “What I also provided was a girlfriend experience. They wanted someone who could listen. They’d blow entire paychecks so they could see and hear all of her and fall in love in the process. I was there to facilitate it, on demand.” For Wired, the journalist Brendan I. Koerner went undercover as an aspiring chatter and detailed the absurd bromides he was taught over the course of his training:
Luka distributed a link to a Google Doc that contained his collected wisdom on the subject of chatting. It included a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who was identified as an American president: “The potential is untapped, dealing with PEOPLE, you may never know what’s awaiting behind the next chat.”
One reason that these scams have proved so captivating is that no one can figure out precisely what they are. The tendency to reach for old terms and models to try to capture this very new phenomenon serves only to underscore the inadequacy of those frameworks. Is this a romance scam, as the lawsuit alleges? Is it catfishing? Is it a typical offshoring model, like an IT support line staffed by workers in Delhi or an IBM call center in Rio?
One word used again and again to describe the management agencies employing chatters is pimp, a strange locution given that these agencies are hired by the creators, not the other way around. The lawyers have used it; Cosmopolitan has used it (“Watch out for the OnlyFans pimps: can they really make you millions?” ran a headline from 2024); legal scholar and antiporn crusader Catharine A. MacKinnon has definitely used it. “I mean, what do you call someone that does that?” asked Dowlatshahi, one of whose lawsuits alleges that Unruly “functions as nothing more than an online pimp.” “That’s kind of the word for it, right?”
It’s possible that Hagens Berman’s invocation of RICO invites the comparison. The mobsters the statute was originally intended to target controlled and profited from New York’s sex trade, including the peep shows, massage parlors, and topless bars that populated Times Square. A New York Times Magazine exposé on chatters prominently featured Jayson Rosero, a Miami-based manager and gym bro whose personal hero was securities fraudster Jordan Belfort—didn’t this hustler resemble nothing so much as a latter-day Gambino brother, a capo for the internet age? Rosero himself used the word e-pimping to refer to his profession, a coinage that ended up in the article’s title. And both civil and criminal RICO statutes have been deployed against websites including Backpage.com, where sex workers advertise their services.
These cases are usually built around instances of sex trafficking, however, or illegal content like rape or the sexual abuse of children. While Dowlatshahi’s clients allege that Unruly pressured them to post increasingly sexual material, most management agencies seem to be following the creators’ lead. Mike Stabile, the public-policy director of the Free Speech Coalition, which lobbies on behalf of the adult industry, argues that, far from being coercive, these agencies are basically doing the work of a personal assistant or a celebrity’s team. “One of the issues that antiporn groups have had with platforms like OnlyFans is that they’ve disrupted this narrative around sexual exploitation [because creators] operate their own businesses and sell their own content and profit from their work,” he said.
OnlyFans has made some people rich beyond their wildest dreams, and this promise sustains the whole enterprise, reeling in fortune seekers looking to ply their wares and agencies eager to cash in on their ambition. (One lawyer who has worked with creators told me that her clients are always trying to get her to start her own page. “I’d probably make more money doing it too,” she said ruefully.) Despite what media coverage might have you believe, however, the vast majority of OnlyFans creators don’t employ agencies, perhaps because they take a hefty cut on top of the platform’s 20 percent commission—or because it simply doesn’t fit with the image they’re cultivating. In a survey of four hundred or so creators that Stabile ran last year, under 6 percent disclosed employing a chat team, and even fewer reported using a management agency. Katie (not her real name), a thirteen-year veteran of the adult industry who’s in the top 1 percent of OnlyFans creators, has cut out the middleman: she now hires and trains a team of chatters directly. “My chat team is just for my pages only, and across all my pages for continuity, which is something agencies can’t provide,” she told me.
Jamie Peck, who runs her own page, says that creators “can do the cost-benefit analysis for themselves and decide if they think it’s worth it.” Peck is a writer and podcaster whose income from OnlyFans has allowed her to work as an unpaid spokesperson for the Stop Cop City movement, currently facing its own RICO suit in Georgia State Court. She always turns down the agencies that contact her to offer representation, skeptical that they could impersonate her convincingly enough to satisfy a fan base that flocks to her page for her views on social reproduction as much as her nudes. “They just seem like really normie porn companies—they don’t know about anarcho-syndicalism,” she told me. Still, the whole thing makes perfect sense to her from a Marxist perspective: “If you’re a worker, and you can automate part of your job and still make the same amount of money as before, of course you’re going to do that,” she said.
Another way in which the chatter phenomenon resembles more traditional outsourcing is that it may eventually be automated out of existence. In Stabile’s survey, more creators reported using AI than they did a human chat team.
$500 on Your Best Day
If the mob was the mirror image of twentieth-century American capitalism, the chatter phenomenon may be its purest expression in the twenty-first. OnlyFans is a British company run by a Ukrainian billionaire, but the lion’s share of its customer base resides in the United States, and every management agency named in the suit is American. The whole thing registers as a particularly homegrown marriage of delusion and deceit: the seller’s hustle to make their small business ever more scalable colliding with the consumer’s desire for better goods and on-demand services for less money—not to mention the middleman’s commitment to profiting on both ends while doing very little. Despite the narrative being advanced by Hagens Berman, everyone’s taking advantage of everyone else. No one is above reproach: certainly not the management agencies; not the creators who condone trickery in order to maximize their earnings; not OnlyFans itself, which turns a blind eye to the scam in exchange for a hefty cut; and not the customers, who seem to feel that they are owed a helping of real human connection alongside their ass shots, all for bargain-basement prices. (Even the lawyers have their role to play. What’s a more time-honored American hustle than civil litigation?)
It’s the American dream: someone is always winning, but almost everyone else is losing.
You might assume that if anyone has standing to sue, it’s the chatters. Emma Francis’s boss chose to forgo the use of a management agency and hired her directly; her coworkers were all North American. But the larger management agencies mostly employ anglophone chatters overseas because they can pay them less. “They are farming out this labor to people in places that do not have as high a minimum wage or as many worker protections,” Peck said. The RICO suit, while not directly representing the chatters as harmed parties, does make mention of their labor conditions. It quotes a chatter who “spoke in graphic detail about the psychological toll of the job” and references a subreddit where “posts have included chatters discussing the labor abuses they suffer at the hands of agencies, such as being forced to work seventy-hour weeks or being fired for missing shifts for circumstances outside their control.” One chatter, the suit relays, “lamented the fact that chatters are being treated like ‘robots,’ and felt the need to assert: ‘We’re humans, we feel.’” These experiences, however, are instrumentalized to bolster the fans’ case, all the better for the lawyers to present the chatters as exploited workers and management agencies as sleazy go-betweens bent on squeezing everyone else dry.
That’s not necessarily a false impression. Based on her conversations with other creators, Katie estimated that there are only around five “reputable” agencies in the industry. One of the reasons she foreswore them herself was their mercenary approach toward customers. “They try to extract as much revenue as humanly possible. They don’t build any relationships. There’s no goal of retention of the fan,” she said. “Some of my fan base has been with me for over a decade.”
And some chatters do seem alienated by their labor: “Talking to hundreds of weirdos per shift while looking at their d***s and telling them how big it is (even if it’s not) is not that easy” is one choice quote from the RICO complaint. “They have become a common occurrence in my life,” a Filipino chatter told El Pais regarding unsolicited dick pics, the sort of quote you can easily picture being delivered alongside a haunting thousand-yard stare. Unruly has also been sued by former employees who alleged workplace abuses like wage theft and unlawful termination.
But the prurient interest the chatter phenomenon stirs—my suspicion is that the gender confusion of predominantly male chatters pretending to be women is really to blame—suggests it’s more unconventional than it actually is. “It just felt like working in a call center. But instead of trying to get people to buy, like, Wi-Fi, I was trying to sell another woman’s nudes,” Francis said. “I burned out from that job really quickly and was completely uninterested in trying to do it again. . . . It felt kind of thrilling for three weeks, and then it felt really boring and irritating.” She writes in GQ that “it’s the kind of job you can’t take a real break from”—a textbook labor violation in many sectors, as anyone who’s ever gotten a UTI from working a Sunday morning brunch shift can attest.
As with other forms of sex work—or sex, or work—some chatters frame their task in the language of empowerment. “You work from home or in a coffee shop and you can make $500 on your best day,” another Filipino chatter told El Pais. That’s around fifty times the local minimum wage. Katie pays her chatters, who are also based in the Philippines, a base wage of $10 an hour, more than the federal minimum wage in the United States; some of her chatters have bought property with their earnings. Meanwhile, for every top creator’s get-rich-quick story, there are many more who struggle to make a living. Writing in The New York Times Magazine in 2021, Charlotte Shane reported that 90 percent of creators earn less than $12,000 annually. It’s the American dream: someone is always winning, but almost everyone else is losing. Some people are just bigger losers than others.
Escape from Cuck Island
Which brings us to the men. What should we make of someone who seeks to redress his sense of grievance at this subterfuge in court? Anecdotally, most reactions have been spirited and contemptuous: “Hahahahaahhhahahahaha you fucking cucks” is one fairly representative response I received. It is hard to have too much sympathy for men who believed that women like 1990s sex symbol Denise Richards, who joined OnlyFans in 2022, were really chatting with them about their day. We have a word for this type of guy: he’s a mark. “I’m telling you, this is a group that’s been defrauded a lot of times, and it’s just the latest round,” Jeff Grell said. “I mean, just watch 90 Day Fiancé, right?” (Grell is a huge 90 Day Fiancé fan; he once wrote an exam that almost uncannily prefigured this RICO suit based on a hypothetical romance scam scenario from the show for one of his law classes.) “Unless you witness what is happening firsthand, you cannot comprehend how sophisticated these systems and schemes are for convincing even questioning Fans that the communications are authentic and from the woman they found attractive or interesting,” Robert Carey wrote when I asked him about the general perception of gullibility that might attach to his clients.
Journalistic accounts of the chatter phenomenon often foreground pathos. A recent Reuters investigation featured a German man who fell so hard for a Hungarian OnlyFans model who resembled an old girlfriend that he got her birth date—or at least the birth date she gave him—tattooed over his heart. “I trusted her,” he said. The piece details his Orphean quest to track her down after the scheme was exposed, eventually becoming a chatter himself. (He didn’t last long, reporting that he found the gig “emotionally draining.”) Nearly every piece on the chatter phenomenon mentions that some of the men seeking to interact with creators merely want to talk about their day, a pattern that is also regularly remarked upon in tales of more traditional sex work. Reading some of these stories, easy mockery gives way to sorrow at just how much lonely men are willing to close their eyes to in the desperate search for human connection.
But these fans are hardly marooned on some island of sincerity as the rapacious sharks of capitalism circle, jaws snapping. User demand drives the chatter machine as much as anything else, and an undercurrent of market logic courses through fans’ wishes for kinship. OnlyFans subscribers tend to flock to the most marketable creators by virtue of their age, gender, and conformity to Western beauty standards—the ones least likely to have the time to engage. Carey himself acknowledged this in a sense, writing me: “99% of Creators provide real communication, as chatters are only used by those Creators represented by agencies—and only the top 1% or so use agencies.” Fans are, of course, not unique in that respect: the same thing happens on dating apps, part of a renewed phenomenon of young people framing the search for sex and romance in bluntly transactional terms. With stifling novelties like “high-value” discourse and height filters on Tinder Platinum—just $39.99 a month!—modern dating conventions make Regency England look like the Summer of Love.
We live in a world in which it is possible at any moment to summon a human to your doorstep bearing tools to assemble your Ikea furniture or the exact banh mi you desire from several neighborhoods away. It is perhaps unsurprising that people extend this same logic to women on OnlyFans, from whom they expect quick and enthusiastic responses at any time of the day or night. One podcast went so far as to describe the platform as “DoorDash for pussy.” In the process of detailing his OnlyFans loss of faith, a fan quoted in the RICO complaint writes: “I was stalled for over 20 minutes before the creator returned with an answer.” It’s unclear if he was upset that someone was impersonating the model he thought he was speaking to or peeved that they made him wait. During Francis’s stint as a chatter, she worked the 6 a.m. shift, one of five or six employees who together maintained the illusion of perpetual horniness (they used a group chat to coordinate). The “girlfriend experience” is half a dozen possibly underpaid workers hiding in a trench coat; real girlfriends need to sleep and eat. “It’s like the Temu principle,” Stabile remarked of the chatter phenomenon. “If you’re paying $1 for something, you don’t have all that much right to get angry if it’s not very good.”
It can be hard to parse where exactly the expectation of instant gratification that app culture encourages ends and old-fashioned misogyny begins. The creators themselves are not actually listed as defendants in the RICO lawsuit; you get the sense the lawyers understand this could register as caddish. But they are mentioned as “unnamed co-conspirators,” and it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that they are the real targets. (In response, Carey wrote me: “Creators are certainly real beneficiaries of the scheme but suing each Creator isn’t feasible due to their sheer number. . . . The agencies—who conceived of this scheme and sold it to mostly young women—bear the greatest culpability.”)
By his own admission, Stabile spends too much time in the grimier corners of the internet, where resentment at the very concept of OnlyFans is pervasive. He paraphrased a typical X comment: “Alpha men don’t pay for this type of thing, and these e-whores are taking our money, and they’re making us submissive.” When he first noticed the Save the Fans ads circulating, he immediately thought that this was a way for aggrieved men to get their revenge. “It just fits in a larger idea of what women owe men,” he said. For men who feel entitled to women—their bodies and their time—it’s not surprising that the prospect of paying for it and not getting the real thing registers as a double betrayal, an expensive reversal of the natural order. As the Involuntary Celibate X account has posted: “Top 3 biggest scams for men in 2023: – Marriage – Therapy – OnlyFans.”
Maybe this is why there’s such an investment in the mystification of the business relationship at the heart of OnlyFans, a mystification that the platform undeniably encourages and profits from with its promise of “authentic connections.” That promise is at the core of the RICO complaint: the word authentic, or some variation, is mentioned thirty-five times in 122 pages. But what does authenticity look like in the context of sex work? “They don’t want a guy in the Philippines faking that they care about you. They want you faking that you care about them,” Peck said.
While the growing awareness of the chatter model might seem like a threat to the company’s bottom line, it’s only increased the premium on real, whatever that even means. Francis wrote in GQ that men would message her things like: “Usually on OnlyFans all the girls on here are actually like some fat dude who lives in his mom’s basement. I can tell you’re real.” Creators like Peck who forego chatters can distinguish themselves that way: “I’m one of a kind, baby,” she said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.” Still, she added, “The idea that they’re getting the real you in the first place is sort of silly.” Those like Katie who find themselves in OnlyFans’ rarefied top 1 percent will benefit most financially if they can find ways, as she has with AI, to more convincingly and consistently impersonate themselves.
Despite the RICO suit’s references to romance scams and catfishing, its very existence is proof that its plaintiffs recognize OnlyFans is selling a product. By taking their grievance to court, the fans are asserting their rights not as forsaken lovers but as consumers who didn’t get what they paid for. Ironically, their retaliation has once again confirmed the notion that money can’t buy love. In real life, you can’t recoup damages when it’s gone, either. All you can do is walk away.