When Patrick Kunz began chatting with a porn star on OnlyFans in April 2022, he couldn’t believe his luck. Nikki was a blonde Hungarian bombshell who resembled his first girlfriend.

Soon, using the social media site’s messaging function, he was chatting with Nikki about everything from their sexual fantasies to their shared love of cats. Kunz, who is 42 and works for an insurance company in Germany, paid her hundreds of dollars to make sex videos just for him, and thousands more in tips.

He fell deeply in love, he said. Nikki said she loved him, too.

Then Kunz started noticing strange things. She seemed to forget subjects they’d already discussed – a recipe for overnight oats, a picture of her own cats. He started asking questions.

“Who are you?” wrote Kunz, who allowed Reuters to read his OnlyFans chats with Nikki.

“What do you meann, babyyy?” came the reply. “It’s meee!☹️”

Kunz slowly realized he was chatting to more than one person. “I fell for her,” he said, “but I’m not stupid.” He was beguiled, he said, by an illusion of intimacy created by a “fraudulent” system.

OnlyFans is a porn-driven, subscription-based website where content creators and their followers can develop what it calls “authentic relationships” by messaging each other. But many popular OnlyFans creators, including porn stars earning millions of dollars through the website, outsource the task of messaging their subscribers to paid impersonators known as “chatters.” It is their job to coax subscribers into tipping the creators and buying more porn.

The presence of chatters on OnlyFans has been documented before, often as a quirky if dubious byproduct of the platform’s runaway success. But a Reuters investigation found they play an essential supporting role in OnlyFans’ business, sustaining a fundamental deception that both hooks and harms loyal customers and brings legal risks to the platform.

OnlyFans doesn’t employ chatters or even acknowledge their existence. Still, they form part of a largely unregulated global ecosystem that has evolved alongside the company’s explosive growth. They are often hired by agencies that manage many top OnlyFans content creators, sometimes referred to as models. All three – agencies, creators and chatters – share the same goal: to persuade subscribers to spend as much money as possible on the models’ accounts.

The deception has been lucrative, helping to generate sensational profits for OnlyFans. The company takes 20% of its creators’ earnings, a cut worth almost $1.1 billion in revenue in 2022 alone. But the use of chatters undermines OnlyFans’ promise of direct connections between creators and subscribers, while exposing often intimate details that subscribers believe to be private. And it potentially places the company in violation of U.S. or European consumer protection and data privacy laws, six legal experts said.

“If you’re telling customers that you’re giving them one thing, but instead giving them something else, then that seems like a paradigm case of a deceptive business practice,” said Brian Berkey, associate professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

The Reuters findings are based on interviews with dozens of chatters, models, and their agents, along with documents such as instruction guides for chatters and sex-industry research. Reuters also examined the services promoted by more than 160 agencies that manage some of OnlyFans’ most profitable creators.

An OnlyFans spokesperson said the company “provides creators with a platform to monetize their content and engage with their fan base. OnlyFans is not affiliated with and does not endorse any third party or agency.”

But OnlyFans knows or should know about creators’ use of impostors and has profited handsomely from the deception, alleges a class-action lawsuit filed in August 2023 in U.S. District Court in Illinois. OnlyFans “lines its pockets by allowing the misconduct of its most successful creators,” says the suit, which seeks more than $5 million in damages. It is one of two separate actions filed on behalf of people allegedly duped by OnlyFans chatters posing as models.

Consumer protection experts said chatters hired to impersonate OnlyFans creators could violate a U.S. law enforced by the Federal Trade Commission that prohibits companies from misleading consumers. If found in breach of the law, OnlyFans could face millions of dollars in fines or be forced to refund millions of dollars paid by subscribers.

OnlyFans didn’t respond to most of Reuters’ questions about chatters, but a company spokesperson said: “As independent content creators, each creator is empowered to manage their own business as long as it is in keeping with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.”

Responding to the Illinois lawsuit in a court filing, Fenix International, OnlyFans’ British parent company, said the platform’s terms of service make clear that creators are legally responsible for transactions with subscribers. Fenix said it bears no responsibility and its role is limited to “providing the OnlyFans platform and storing content.” It also said OnlyFans is immune from U.S. lawsuits due to a federal law that exempts websites from liability for users’ activity.

Founded in 2016, OnlyFans has 3.2 million creators, who typically earn money by charging monthly subscriptions of between $4.99 and $50 each. An even bigger money-spinner for creators is direct messages: They can ask fans for tips that sometimes total thousands of dollars and persuade subscribers to buy extra porn tailored to their fantasies.

“This is where the real money comes from,” says Bogdan Dumitrescu, who runs the Romanian branch of U.S. agency Adult Media Promotion, which manages dozens of OnlyFans models and chatters. OnlyFans’ cut from tips and payments for custom-made porn accounted for slightly more revenue than subscriptions in 2022, according to its most recent corporate filings.

Agencies proliferated during the isolating shutdowns of the coronavirus pandemic. They typically sign up young women with the purpose of turning them into top OnlyFans models. Some agencies charge a flat fee, but most work on commission, taking 20% to 80% of a model’s total earnings. Many of these models, assisted by chatters, are now among the big earners on the site.

Reuters spoke with 15 chatters who said creators and agencies instruct them to perpetuate the fiction that they’re OnlyFans porn stars. They described how they target lovelorn or sex-starved men and use deflection, gaslighting and other tactics to deal with subscribers who question their identity. Many chatters operate from the Philippines, low-wage countries in Europe and parts of the U.S.

“We’re creating a fantasy world for these men,” said Maica Versoza, 30, who runs a chatting operation with her husband in the Philippines city of Bacolod. She said the key is to build a relationship with subscribers and “make them feel wanted.”

A male chatter, Ani Akpan, said he has worked for four agencies and impersonated “countless” female OnlyFans models, coaxing even reluctant spenders into parting with thousands of dollars. “The best thing is to just tell the person to spoil you more,” said the 32-year-old Nigerian, a former soccer coach who now lives in the Philippines.

OnlyFans’ website says the company rigorously vets creators’ identities and forbids “misleading or deceptive conduct.” But it says nothing about vetting the agencies and chatters who can have a huge emotional and financial impact on subscribers like Kunz. The OnlyFans spokesperson wouldn’t confirm or deny the existence of chatters on the platform.

Chatters have access to intimate material fans sometimes share – from naked photos and descriptions of sexual fantasies to details about their jobs and families, and even their real names.

OnlyFans’ website says it is “committed to protecting the personal data” of its users. But it doesn’t mention that subscriber information can be spread far and wide with chatters and agencies.

“You have this expectation of privacy and confidentiality that you think is there and it’s not,” said Robert Carey, a Phoenix-based lawyer who on July 29 also filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in central California. His suit targeted OnlyFans and nine agencies for what it called “chatter scams.”

“You might be talking about your wife, your girlfriend, your loneliness. Stuff that’s embarrassing,” he said. “That information is going all over the place and you have no idea.”

OnlyFans could not immediately be reached for comment on the lawsuit.

To some subscribers, OnlyFans provides a remedy for the loneliness of the online age. The company claims to offer something more meaningful than the free porn that saturates the internet: a chance to interact with its creators for companionship and even intimacy. In a TEDx talk in 2023, CEO Keily Blair described OnlyFans as a “real community based on a real two-way connection” between creators and users.

Kunz, however, said the people who impersonated the woman of his dreams left him so devastated that he had to seek therapy and take time off work.

“We had a really close relationship,” he told Reuters. “I trusted her.” He even tattooed her birthdate over his heart – “at least what I believe is her birthdate.”

Angry and hurt, Kunz embarked upon a mission. He sought to reconnect with Nikki, who he still had feelings for, and confront OnlyFans about the deceptive use of chatters.

Along the way, something unexpected happened: He became a chatter himself.

‘DO YOU THINK I’M FAKE?’

OnlyFans’ terms of service don’t mention chatters. Nor is the use of chatters noted in the account bios of its models. Their existence is a secret – and the chatters say they are expected to keep it that way.

Diana Calisin is a nursing student who has worked for three years as a chatter from her home near Bacolod City in the Philippines. She said she had been asked “many times” by OnlyFans subscribers if she was really the model.

“We try to deny it at first,” she said. “We reply, ‘What do you mean, chatter? I never heard of that before.’”

If the subscriber persists, she said, “we try to reverse-psych or guilt-trip him. ‘You’re offending me, babe. Do you think I’m fake?’”

Of the 15 chatters that Reuters interviewed, eight were men who said they usually impersonated women. Eleven spoke on condition that their full names not be used, citing concerns over losing work or facing consequences for their role in deceiving people. Chatting is subject to prosecution in the Philippines under a law that prohibits computer-related fraud and other offenses, said a spokesperson for the country’s Department of Information and Communications Technology.

Chatters typically access the accounts of OnlyFans models with specialized software administered by the management agencies. The software – created by third-party vendors, not OnlyFans – allows chatters to message subscribers, trace their spending and monitor the model’s earnings. It can also build profiles of every subscriber. A profile might include a subscriber’s home country, job, pets, hobbies and “things that he mostly talks about,” said Calisin. This allows a seamless shift-change with the next chatter without raising the subscriber’s suspicion.

Some chatters simply use models’ passwords to log into their accounts, without using any software.

Thanks to its booming call-center industry, the Philippines has a cheap workforce adept at remote customer service. But chatters must deliver a different kind of customer satisfaction. Nearly all of them said indulging the sexual fetishes of subscribers was one of the toughest parts of the job. They often exchange sexual messages with scores of mostly male subscribers simultaneously.

A male chatter said one OnlyFans subscriber paid a model between $500 and $1,000 to make videos of herself wearing pale make-up and pretending she was dead. “Some people on the platform are really disturbed,” he said.

Angielyn Bandoy, another Filipina chatter, said she makes a little extra by selling a bundle of prepared scripts for 500 pesos ($9) to other chatters. The scripts, sometimes called JOIs or “jerk-off instructions,” help them engage with subscribers who like, say, older women or sex in cars.

Twenty involve feet. “Would you like to have some fun, footboy?” reads one script reviewed by Reuters.

Some chatters said scripts improve their productivity.

“I chat to 5-20 dudes at once so copying and pasting phrases is efficient,” a 23-year-old male chatter in Manila told Reuters in a message. He said he earns about $2,000 a month impersonating OnlyFans models, most of them female.

He said suspicious subscribers sometimes ask for a photo of the model holding up a certain number of fingers. Not a problem: He selects from a variety of photos, supplied in advance, of models holding up one or more fingers.

Bandoy’s bundle also includes a guide with general advice for chatters. If you promise to make a subscriber a three-minute video, don’t send it for at least three minutes to give the impression “it’s being done in real time,” the guide says. Also, if the subscriber doesn’t have a nickname, then give him one. “Big daddy, sexy cyber boy, etc. – doesn’t matter if it’s cringey. Just make it stick and always call him that.”

Versoza, the chatter from Bacolod City, and her husband work from home while a helper looks after their 8-year-old daughter in another room. Her sister and sister’s boyfriend are also chatters.

The work can be all-consuming. Depending on the model and the agency, Versoza said she works seven-to-12-hour shifts, seven days a week. On a typical day, she and her husband might chat with 10 to 30 subscribers, she said. On a busy day, it might be 200.

A skilled chatter working on commission for a popular model can earn up to $3,000 a month, she said – a fortune in the Philippines, where the average monthly wage is $330. Versoza earns $800 to $1,000 per month, she said.

Models can make much more. Versoza shared screenshots with Reuters of one model’s monthly earnings on OnlyFans. The figures indicate that Versoza and her husband had generated $1.5 million in revenue for the model in eight months. A subscriber paid $14,000 in a single month for another model Versoza worked for, she said. Much of the money was made through pay-per-view (PPV) content – pre-recorded videos and photos.

“Horny men won’t mind spending big,” said Christine, 23, a Filipina chatter who gave only a first name. “So the goal is to always turn them on. When they’re really horny, they can’t think straight and rational. They become hungry for PPVs and impulsively buy more.”

A former customer service representative for multinational companies, Christine said some subscribers form an emotional attachment and just want to talk. “This type of fan is the boring one for me because I can’t make a sale out of just talking and talking.”

The chatters who spoke with Reuters said they have worked for all types of models – male, female or transgender. But they mostly impersonate young European and American women.

Dumitrescu of Adult Media Promotion says men make the best chatters for female models. That’s because they know what male subscribers want and don’t let emotions interfere with selling the porn.

“They are machines,” he said of male chatters. If a subscriber makes offensive remarks about the model’s body or bargains too hard, his chatters “just sell to another guy. They don’t care.”

DESPERATELY SEEKING NIKKI

By spring 2023, Patrick Kunz was tormented by the suspicion that his messages with Nikki were being answered by chatters.

It wasn’t just her forgetfulness, he said. Sometimes her messages grew more frequent – previously, there had been long gaps between them – and more brusque.

“You just come across as a man sometimes,” wrote Kunz.

“whaaattt?! did i? noo! it’s me, honey ❤️”

Once, Kunz received messages from her on OnlyFans while he was watching her perform a live sex show on another porn platform. When he challenged her, she explained that the show was on a short delay, which is why she seemed to be sexting on OnlyFans at the same time.

Kunz knew that some models use chatters. But Nikki said repeatedly that she handled her own account and had “no money to hire chatters.”

“I respond to every single message personally ❤️,” said the bio on her OnlyFans account, where Kunz poured out his heart for about 18 months. “I’d love to get to know u better and build a good personal relationship with you.”

Kunz said he eventually grew so suspicious that he addressed some messages not to Nikki but to the impostors he believed were reading and replying. “Stay out of my chat,” he told them.

“What are you talking about?” came the reply.

The content Kunz bought from Nikki ranged from explicit videos to photos of her on vacation, he said. He also sought to support her in other ways. Every month, for six or seven months, he gave her $200 in “pocket money” through OnlyFans’ tipping function. He gave her money to pay for medicine and car repairs, he said, and paid a monthly subscription of about $10.

In total, he said, he spent about $7,300 on Nikki. OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of all such revenue.

He now thinks various chatters strung him along to keep the money coming in. “They used my love for her against me,” he said. “From where I stand now it looks like a big romance scam.”

Kunz said he understood why some models need chatters: A solo creator would struggle to handle even 50 subscribers a day scattered across different time zones.

But when OnlyFans says it hosts authentic relationships, and creators falsely claim they’re talking personally to subscribers, “then it’s a betrayal,” he said.

‘CHAMPAGNE. SUPER CARS. PRIVATE JETS!’

By promising to connect subscribers and creators, OnlyFans sets up an expectation that’s impossible for many busy porn stars to fulfill. Popular creators, overwhelmed with messages, seek help from the hundreds of agencies that have proliferated to cash in on the OnlyFans boom.

When U.S. porn star Chloe Amour’s OnlyFans account took off, she enjoyed the “rush” of chatting with subscribers. “I’m happy when I’m pleasing people,” she said in an interview. But now that she has 15,000 subscribers on OnlyFans, an agency and chatters help her with the task. “Let’s be real. Every single person who’s successful on OnlyFans, it’s super rare if they’re handling that all by themselves.”

Today, many of the top 1% of OnlyFans creators are managed by agencies, according to three agency officials. Nearly every agency promises, for a cut of the profits, to handle all aspects of a creator’s OnlyFans account, leaving the models with only one task: producing porn.

Agencies manage the model’s account, hire chatters, arrange sales of custom-made porn, and promote the models on popular social media platforms. Some models say they never log into their OnlyFans accounts. They just send the porn to the agency.

“All you have to do is create content and the rest is done for you!” says the Millions Management agency on its website. That pitch to prospective models is typical of many used by the 160 agencies Reuters scrutinized.

Creators told Reuters that they often produce their porn weeks before any chat with a subscriber. An agency account manager typically stores it in a private online folder, where chatters can access it and present it to subscribers as a new, custom-made product, available for a fee.

Models who are managed by agencies and impersonated by chatters don’t disclose these arrangements on their OnlyFans pages, according to a review of dozens of top-performing OnlyFans accounts and the agencies’ online promotional materials.

Agencies often present OnlyFans to aspiring models as an easy, risk-free path to wealth and glamor. “Buy what you want, travel around the world,” promises the Exotix agency. “Champagne. Super cars. Private Jets! With OnlyFans it’s no longer a dream,” says The Dream Team agency. Some agency websites claim their models earn more than $100,000 a month.

Only a tiny fraction of OnlyFans’ three million creators make that kind of money. Bedbible.com, a sex-industry research firm owned by a Danish advertising company, estimates that the top 0.1% of creators on OnlyFans earn on average about $2.3 million each a year, while most creators make less than $100 a month.

Dutch businessman Monder Van der Ploeg co-founded an agency called AlpineOaks in July 2022. At its peak, he said, the Rijnsburg-based agency handled more than 50 OnlyFans models from an office building shared with his other business: truck detailing.

With a background in sales, Van der Ploeg trained his chatters, who were mostly Dutch, or did the job himself, he said.

He said his identity was never challenged by subscribers, because he took pains to learn about their lives – their marital status, the names of their pets, the health of their mothers.

One of his agency’s models was Nikki, the woman Patrick Kunz fell in love with. She appeared last year on the landing page of AlpineOaks’ website.

Some of his agency’s models used chatters half of the time or less, he said, adding that he couldn’t remember how often Nikki used them.

Van der Ploeg said Nikki left the agency at the end of 2023 and declined to talk further about her, citing privacy reasons. He wouldn’t disclose how much he earned. He dissolved the agency after a lucrative but grueling year, he said.

“People think OnlyFans is like a free money-printing system. But that’s far from the truth. It’s really hard work.”

OnlyFans’ business model shook up the porn industry by cutting out profit-hungry studios and giving power and profits back to the performers – most of them women. But agencies are emerging as the new middlemen, Reuters found. Some are even employing AI bots to do the chatting.

A few models are pushing back, promoting their accounts with the phrases “no agency” or “no chatters.”

Avva Ballerina, a 21-year-old from Vienna listed among OnlyFans’ top earners, said she doesn’t use agencies because they exploit women and deceive subscribers. “It’s not fine anymore when you fool people.”

She said she continues to chat with subscribers personally.

“It’s a lot of work, obviously. My fans sometimes don’t get an answer for 12 hours or eight hours when I’m asleep. But they’re okay with that.”

‘UNJUST ENRICHMENT’

Illinois resident Phillip McFadden and John DeFranza of New Jersey also assumed they were communicating directly with creators. In a U.S. class action suit filed last year, the men now contend OnlyFans defrauded them.

McFadden, the suit said, thought he was talking to porn stars Riley Reid and Kimmy Granger but grew suspicious because of typos in their messages. Later he learned the women worked with an agency, All Star Hustle, that managed their OnlyFans’ accounts, including messages with fans. DeFranza thought he was chatting with “the sexiest weather girl in the world” – Yanet Garcia, a TV star in Mexico – but an agency controlled her account and messages, according to the suit.

All Star Hustle, Reid, Granger and Garcia didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit accuses Fenix International, OnlyFans’ parent company, and its U.S. subsidiary of breach of contract, breach of fair dealing and unjust enrichment. It also alleges consumer fraud under state laws.

Under British and European Union consumer-protection laws, OnlyFans could be held liable for “misrepresenting what you do to consumers to convince them to buy things,” said Catalina Goanta, associate professor at the Utrecht University School of Law in the Netherlands.

OnlyFans’ terms of service say that only individuals can be creators, but they can choose a third party to operate their account and remain “legally responsible” for its content and use.

Two legal experts said that disclaimer might protect the company from liability. Six others disagreed.

“They still have to have some sort of due diligence to stop people getting defrauded,” said Katherine Hart, spokesperson for the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, a UK nonprofit consumer protection group.

The class-action suit by Carey, the Phoenix attorney, accuses Fenix of violating not just privacy laws but also the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a federal law governing alleged fraud schemes and best known for prosecuting gangsters.

“This case goes beyond typical romance scams by involving an online platform used to perpetrate a systemic deception that exploits victims’ trust on an unprecedented scale,” alleges the suit, which has more than 100 class members.

One of them is a 31-year-old semiconductor assembly technician who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity. He said he spent nearly $20,000 on OnlyFans over four years before learning he’d been fooled by chatters. “I was lonely,” he said. “That’s really pathetic that someone is trying to take advantage of you.”

He blames OnlyFans, not just the chatters. “They would know what’s going on on their website,” he said. “They would have executive authority to stop it.”

Personal and intimate information can easily be leaked, Reuters found. A chatter in the Philippines posted her resume in a public online forum – and included screenshots of subscriber information along with their sexual banter.

Such privacy breaches trouble Ali, a 39-year-old Texan who is also a member of Carey’s suit. Someone in a faraway country could use leaked information to track down subscribers “and start blackmailing them,” he said in an interview.

‘IT WASN’T ME’

In October 2023, Kunz messaged OnlyFans to complain that “someone is pretending to be the account holder and deceiving subscribers.”

OnlyFans replied the same day, with a recitation of its terms of service: Creators are responsible for their own accounts.

Kunz said he wasn’t satisfied. His suspicions only grew.

After first meeting Nikki through OnlyFans, he had given her his telephone number. About ten months later, he received a WhatsApp from a Romanian number with a short message (“Hey”) and a photo of Nikki’s cats. His replies went unanswered.

The Romanian number was the first clue that Nikki wasn’t Hungarian, as her profile said. Kunz had also noted that a photo on OnlyFans showed her posing with a Romanian-language book.

On Dec. 3, Kunz decided to call the number. He enlisted a Romanian translator, who sat beside him, and made a recording of the conversation, which Reuters reviewed.

“You can tell him it wasn’t me in some of the chats,” said Nikki in Romanian to the translator. “You know how OnlyFans is done.”

Nikki acknowledged an agency had chatted with Kunz on her behalf. She didn’t name the agency or say when she had worked with it.

Nikki said she didn’t know that Kunz loved her – even though he had told her so in dozens of messages, often getting the same declarations in return. “I love you more than any word can say ❤️,” came a reply, supposedly from Nikki, on Oct. 3.

Reached by Reuters separately, Nikki confirmed she was from Cluj in northern Romania but declined to answer any questions.

Kunz struggled to accept his new reality: He thought he’d bonded with Nikki but had been pouring his heart out to strangers. “She went on with her life. I didn’t.”

Furious with OnlyFans and humiliated, Kunz developed a reluctant fascination for chatters and how they worked.

In April 2024, he spotted an ad on Reddit. “German chatters wanted!” the post said in German. “If you have a passion for writing and enjoy creating erotic content, then this position could be just right for you!”

Kunz answered the ad and learned it had been placed by a German-run agency called Nakama. After a brief telephone interview, and with no apparent background check, the agency gave Kunz a trial chatting for a 24-year-old Ukrainian model named Lisa. “I was shocked how easy it was to get inside,” he said.

The agency gave him access to Lisa’s OnlyFans account through software called Infloww, where it stored profiles of her subscribers with “a lot of private info,” said Kunz. The customer details included their jobs, countries of residence and porn-buying history. The Nakama agency and Infloww didn’t respond to a request for comment.

During an eight-hour shift in April, Kunz chatted with up to six male subscribers simultaneously. He was guided by the profiles and didn’t use a script. He earned 10% of the $167 he said he raised, less than $17. Afterward, the agency offered him a job.

He turned it down.

Kunz said he found chatting emotionally draining. Some subscribers just wanted to talk, while others were rude; all seemed convinced they were chatting with the model.

One happy subscriber sent him a $5 tip. “I didn’t feel bad about this,” said Kunz. “I gave him a good feeling and he gave me a little reward.”

As for Nikki, he said he still cares for her. Knowing that she used chatters hasn’t changed his feelings. She “isn’t the problem,” he said. “The schemes on OnlyFans are.”

Additional reporting from Luiza Ilie in Bucharest and Mikhail Flores in Manila.