How is this not fraud, or at least false advertising? If I'm paying money to chat with a specific sex worker how is it even legal to let some random dude in a third world country pretend to be the person I'm supposed to be talking to? I've never personally engaged in these types of systems, but I don't think there's a problem with them as long as they are run honestly. It sounds like Onlyfans is exploiting workers and their own customers.

• mingus88

  today at 6:54 PM

  It is fraud. However, one thing has become crystal clear lately is that laws are only as good as we have systems in place that are willing and able to enforce them.

  And further, scamming people in the context of sex has always been easy because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.

  Imagine filing a report that you spent thousands of dollars chatting with some random person, having the chat logs submitted as evidence, etc. it’s similar to why all types of sexual assault are rarely reported

  • ahnick

    today at 7:55 PM

    > laws are only as good as we have systems in place that are willing and ABLE to enforce them.

    The 'able' part is the critical insight. Laws are too often passed that really have no ability to be enforced, but end up adding bureaucratic processes that law abiding companies have to follow. This also implies that governments need to actively clean up existing laws, which almost never happens unless there is enough support to pass a new law to actively supplant the old one.

  • ghurtado

    today at 6:56 PM

    > because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.

    I would argue that the reason has more to do with our utter inability to create common sense laws regarding anything "sex".

    • jzb

      today at 7:02 PM

      Which goes back to the shame thing, really. Few people are willing to stand up and advocate for common sense laws because they don’t want to be associated with anything regarding sex. Politicians, whom are not generally noted for being averse to hiring sex workers, sure as hell don’t want to be advocating for them for fear of losing elections.

      • aleph_minus_one

        today at 7:43 PM

        > Politicians [...] don’t want to be advocating for them for fear of losing elections.

        This assumes that the politician plans and has a chance to become re-elected. If this is not the case, the arguments for not advocating for such laws become much less important for the respective politician.

        • monocasa

          today at 7:55 PM

          A politician can rarely enact laws alone, and the above issues typically apply to enough politicians at a time to make having a quorum difficult.

      • actionfromafar

        today at 7:46 PM

        Don't you think it also comes down to "exploitation" and not shame alone?

• shrubble

  today at 6:56 PM

  This was done by “mail order bride” companies like those in Russia and Ukraine, that charge per message or letter sent back and forth, using their platform that does not allow for contact information to be shared; you are not talking to Anastasia but “Hairy Boris”!

  Later scams evolved to use prerecorded video clips etc. Which I assume is next for OF also.

• SoftTalker

  today at 7:26 PM

  It's no more fraud than any other "fan club" where you got letters and personal autographs and such from the celebrity but didn't realize it was all done by a hired staff of employees. It's been a thing for decades.

• V__

  today at 6:37 PM

  There is probably some lingo somewhere clarifying that you pay for the "experience" of her and not for her in particular.

• iugtmkbdfil834

  today at 6:32 PM

  But then.. how is it any different from Amazon saying automated stores while a human is watching cameras or waymo having humans operate in some circumstances. If there are no rules, you can't expect corporates to govern themselves in a way that does not benefit them..

  • gruez

    today at 7:31 PM

    >But then.. how is it any different from Amazon saying automated stores while a human is watching cameras or waymo having humans operate in some circumstances.

    Did amazon/waymo actually claim they were 100% automated? Moreover is the fact that they're 100% automated a material fact to the consumer? The investors might have grounds to sue for securities fraud, but it's going to be much tougher for a consumer, when for all intents and purposes they got what they expected (ie. whatever they bought from the shop).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_fact

  • autoexec

    today at 7:28 PM

    People don't usually pay for automated stores or rides because of the automated aspect. They just want to get the items or get to their destination. I think waymo was mostly upfront that humans are working behind the scenes, but if amazon lied to investors and shareholders by claiming that their stores were automated when it was "Actually Indians" I think they could/should have been sued.

• neya

  today at 7:33 PM

  It is fraud. But these parties are protected by OnlyFans themselves. Similar to how dating apps promote (and actually lot of them enforce) fake accounts with fake pictures because it boosts everything - engagement and revenue. So they always turn a blind eye.

  Last week, I used a dating app where they used a fake profile tailored specifically for me, using a married woman's photo. I deleted the app. Every app in this space is scummy and the people at the top running these are just trash. That's the real reason.

• bawolff

  today at 6:43 PM

  I wonder to what extent the clients care. Either way its still paying for a fantasy.

• whynotmaybe

  today at 6:34 PM

  Do we know if onlyfan is already training their own models with their user's content?

  • giantrobot

    today at 6:55 PM

    How could they not be? At $2 an hour they'd be leaving money on the table by not paying a tiny fraction of that for an LLM.

    • thfuran

      today at 7:47 PM

      I don't think it's the platform paying the workers. I think they're third parties hired by the posters. Of course, OnlyFans itself could theoretically create and offer a service to replace them, but Fraud As A Service doesn't actually seem all that reliable as a business model.

• fHr

  today at 8:03 PM

  It is blatant fraud and onlyfans should be suable for this. Fuck that whole company and all their bs pr management workers doing nothing getting rich on regarded male beta simp money.

• thedelanyo

  today at 6:34 PM

  That's why China ban this service outright? But hey, America is a democratic and freedom land.

As an aside:

> OnlyFans, which generated $7.2bn (£5.3bn) revenue in 2024, ..

I didn't expect their revenue to be that high, but I suppose it's also unsurprising.

2$ an hour chatter and 20$ an hour 'model', both replaced by AI.

Now this is almost entirely automated anyway, there is a big adult ecosystem here in Cyprus and i talk to a lot of people. No manual work is used there anymore, "chatters" are a thing of the past.

Now they are well on the path to automate OnlyFans models themselves, there are plenty of hybrid sites where known live models are attracted with good terms to bring in the users, and then slowly switched for AI ones, and it WORKS.

Adult industry is so competitive and fast-evolving because there are few deep moats, it shows the way for everyone else, in fact.

• vimda

  today at 5:56 PM

  God that's depressing. Even when you _pay_ for human connection you're being fobbed off onto an AI

  • PeterStuer

    today at 6:13 PM

    Bet you had some really deep human connection with that guy chatting to you from the Philippines.

    • vimda

      today at 6:35 PM

      You betray your ignorance of how parasocial OnlyFans and their ilk get. Yes, people get real connection out of it, whether its with who they think they're talking to or not. I think that connecting those people into a chat bot instead of a real human is depressing, and a bad thing for society, but you're welcome to disagree with that

      • ndriscoll

        today at 7:16 PM

        Talking to a real human seems more depressing to me, especially when they're making less than $2/hour doing it, have multiple chats going all trying to hit sales targets, and they feel bad for you in the interaction. Paying for female attention is pretty bad, but not even getting the attention you paid for is just bleak. At that point go with the machine. At least it's not thinking "what the hell am I doing here?" while it's generating messages.

      • PeterStuer

        today at 7:38 PM

        I'll admit. I' too old to 'get' OF.

      • luckylion

        today at 7:29 PM

        What's the difference? The users think they talk to some specific person and form a connection with them, and they don't.

        Whether they get strung along by a human, a chatbot, or a simple cronjob - does it matter?

      • nkrisc

        today at 7:36 PM

        It’s not a real connection. It’s completely invented in their mind. Probably more accurate to call it a delusion.

  • nine_k

    today at 6:24 PM

    To pay for a human connection, take someone out for a dinner, and foot the bill.

    At OnlyFans you're paying for a video feed, and computers are pretty good at producing convincing video feeds now.

    • localuser13

      today at 7:02 PM

      >To pay for a human connection, take someone out for a dinner, and foot the bill.

      I'm married now, and never used any parasocial platform OnlyFans or another, but trivializing the problem of young adult loneliness is either ignorant or condescending.

      A large fraction of young males don't have anyone to "take out for a dinner", or at least have no idea how to initiate that. You may scoff at that, but I certainly wouldn't know how to do it, and money was not a problem. Paying for human connection, especially online, was tempting.

      • prepend

        today at 7:41 PM

        The solution to loneliness isn’t fake connections. And I think makes it even worse because fake friends don’t act like real people and make it harder to form real relationships with people who have their own desires and needs and aren’t just sycophants receiving pay.

      • asdff

        today at 7:44 PM

        Taking someone out for a dinner and footing the bill does not require you to be some cassanova. Escort services are a thing and honestly somewhat increasingly normalized. The latest chris hemsworth movie had him using an escort and didn't paint him as weird for it or anything, kind of just seemed like a gym membership or any other service the way it was casually broached (he played a certain healthy/rich/clean cut professional thief/perhaps even autistic character).

        • mothballed

          today at 7:54 PM

          I don't think the escort service is necessarily because you can't get a woman. As they say you don't pay them to "fuck", you pay them to leave. It's a way to have a moment of romance without the crushing weight of having the commitment of children, family, the household and all the other challenges they may be dealing with their life.

  • throwaway5752

    today at 6:25 PM

    It's going to kill the software industry as we know it!

    We're literally killing our field by making the devices and internet so repulsive that people are actively unplugging. You can't hear about this online because the bot generated content is filling the gap and the people doing it aren't online to tell you about it.

    Children are getting addicted to everything because the internet has killed any sense of self-stimulation and they are growing up into gamblers with cards, sports, and prediction markets or rage-addicted media consumers.

    There is plenty of human connection to be had out there, it is free, and all you have to do is put down the phone or computer. It is getting extremely compelling as an alternative for increasing large groups of people.

    The tech industry is energetically strangling its golden goose.

    • SoftTalker

      today at 6:44 PM

      There will be some interesting game theory studies in the aftermath.

      • localuser13

        today at 7:05 PM

        I think that's just a good old prisoner dilemma. You can't have a free-range golden goose, because if you grow it responsibly, others will abuse it first and you will get out of business. The only way is to be as greedy as legally allowed, because otherwise you're left behind.

  • cess11

    today at 6:20 PM

    What do you mean by "human connection"?

    • steve_adams_86

      today at 6:29 PM

      It appears a lot of people using OF are using it as a parasocial medium, not strictly for porn. They want to believe they're actually in touch with the performer and part of their lives to some degree.

      • hackyhacky

        today at 6:52 PM

        Yes, and it's sad.

        I wish someone would create a business that profits from people forming actual connections with each other, but every opportunity has been displaced.

        Dating sites replaces meeting IRL, and foster superficial relationships anyway. Bars are passé. Social clubs, golf clubs, etc, seem to belong to a past generation. Social media killed the social part. The damage to society is real.

        • asdff

          today at 7:48 PM

          Every time someone says something like this, I can think of examples of every point just from the limited scope of my own life to the contrary, which from the frequency it happens I'm guessing indicates my experience isn't so unique and the world isn't this doom and gloom black and white world as described on the internet. People still meet serendipitously. People still go out. The golf club at my municipal course still throws out several tournaments a year with enough demand for like four each mens and womens handicap flights. Maybe the people alleging these things have to look inwardly and ask why they aren't themselves doing these things that can still be done today.

        • ndriscoll

          today at 7:27 PM

          There is one: universities. They're just really expensive so you can't stay there for more than a few years, and people aren't properly advised of how important the opportunity is.

        • prepend

          today at 7:44 PM

          Meetup is kind of like that. I use it for ongoing hiking clubs and book clubs and movie clubs.

          Comically, Facebook sort of serves this way as well by brining together hiking clubs and d&d groups.

      • cess11

        today at 6:34 PM

        What does "para-" mean?

        Edit: Right, 'beside', 'outside', like in paranormal. Now, are parasocial relationships "human connection"?

        • alwa

          today at 6:55 PM

          “Para-“ tends to mean “around” or “beside,” kind of in the sense of “close to" or "almost”--paraprofessional teachers or lawyers, paramilitary groups, parallel lines, parasitic symbiotes. In this specific context, American sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl (1956) [0] coined the notion of “para-social" relations, in order to describe audience members’ intensifying, one-sided sensations-of-relationships with media characters as American-style mass media came into its own:

          > The most remote and illustrious men are met as if they were in the circle of one's peers; the same is true of a character in a story who comes to life in these media in an especially vivid and arresting way. We propose to call this seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship.

          They contrast para-social relations with face-to-face ones, which they call ortho-social:

          > The crucial difference in experience obviously lies in the lack of effective reciprocity [...] To be sure, the audience is free to choose among the relationships offered, but it cannot create new ones. Whoever finds the experience unsatisfying has only the option to withdraw.

          > ...the media present opportunities for the playing of roles to which the spectator has–or feels he has–a legitimate claim, but for which he finds no opportunity in his social environment. This function of the para-social then can properly be called compensatory, inasmuch as it provides the socially and psychologically isolated with a chance to enjoy the elixir of sociability.

          It's a brisk accessible read, and spookily still relevant. Thanks for the impetus to dust it off :)

          Anyway—in the 2010s, social scientists began to use the idea to think about the emerging class of even-more-intimate, confessional celebrities—like the Kardashians—as those celebrities started to use the socials ‘round the clock and to broadcast seemingly intimate, unguarded moments [1]. “Healthy” doesn’t seem to be the word the researchers and clinicians tend to choose...

          [0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00332747.1956.11...

          [1] e.g. https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research_all/7/

        • jihadjihad

          today at 6:51 PM

          para- has a variety of meanings [0] depending on which word it’s used to form.

          Parasocial itself means “one-sided” in a relationship [1].

          0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/para-#English

          1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/parasocial

        • jfengel

          today at 6:54 PM

          It means that it shares some, but not all, aspects of a social relationship.

          It's often applied to one-sided relationships with celebrities, where you feel a personal connection to them but they literally don't know you exist.

• createaccount99

  today at 6:30 PM

  That's pretty smart.

• tehjoker

  today at 6:23 PM

  Does that mean that people do not recognize that some of the content is AI? Or do they simply accept it?

  • myhf

    today at 6:32 PM

    A little bit of real content goes a long way toward getting people to pay for something unknown, which then turns out to be AI-generated. Even if they are not satisfied, that counts as AI content making a sale.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke

  • firtoz

    today at 6:29 PM

    There's enough people on both camps I'm sure.

> She would be set targets to earn the model hundreds of dollars worth of sales of pictures and videos during her shift.

So lets assume $300 per shift, so with an 8 hour shift, that would be about $37.50/hour of merchandise per hour. So the workers makes about 5.3%. Google says standard for sales workers paid on comission normally get 5-10%.

So its possible this is within what would be normal for a low end non-salary commision job, but it depends on what "hundreds" really mean. Of course i think normally for commision only sales jobs you move much more expensive product to make it worth your while.

Otoh they probably deserve a lot higher than normal sales commision given the nature of the job and all the stuff they undoubtedly have to put up with.

Somewhat unrelated but I won’t be surprised if we eventually find out a lot of OnlyFans revenue is money laundering.

• Invictus0

  today at 7:03 PM

  Doubtful, there are other, less-well known pay-for-content platforms than take a smaller percentage cut than onlyfans. It wouldn't make any sense for a launderer to use the most expensive platform.

Isn’t $2/hour a pretty high salary in Philliphines?

This is skeezy (edit: fixing autocorrect’s sleepy), but then so is chatting with onlyfans models. It’s already a fake, paradoxical relationship and even that aspect is fake. It’s delusions on deceptions.

• Lerc

  today at 7:40 PM

  I have never seen sleepy used that way before.

  I did a quick run of the numbers and it is rather hard to tell what the average hourly rate ìs. But it look a like if you went for four 40 hour weeks to get 320 it seems to be a little below the average pay for a call center operator.

  In one sense this is a story of someone feeling bad about being paid to do something wrong.

  It is not quite so simple when the reason why this happens is the income differential between countries makes it possible for people to be paid enough to put aside their ethics. That becomes easier when the processes is normalised so that they are not the only person making the same compromise.

  Adding to the complexity of the situation is the fact that paying people like this puts money into the their economies and that can spur regional development to provide a higher pay level all round, causing the ethically dubious work to become less attractive.

  In the very long term the only way to avoid the higher power of foreign weather from doing this is to balance incomes around the world. That requires accepting that the current wealthy countries cannot get cheap things by paying poorer people low wages, and that means having less for themselves.

  • prepend

    today at 7:46 PM

    Sorry, autocorrect changed “skeezy” to “sleepy.” I think at the end of the comment, too. It wasn’t an immediate word or sentence change. I need to work harder to proof comments before posting. (Autocorrect changed “proof” to “prof” at the end of that sentence)

Related: in Germany, there currently is a huge scandal surrounding the company "Fanblast", where you could purchase the supposed "whatsapp phone number" of various "celebrities" and, allegedly, the chats were also run by random freelancers [1].

[1] https://www.comicschau.de/news/fanblast-aloa-me-klengan-krit...

[flagged]

• steve1977

  today at 6:06 PM

  That's a good plan. We did that with drugs and it worked fabulously.

  • SpicyLemonZest

    today at 6:49 PM

    It did! We saw with the opioid crisis just how much devastation can be caused by a single drug wiggling its way into legality.

• morkalork

  today at 6:04 PM

  Now you have two problems: That poor soul has lost their meager income and you've criminalized countless people who will no doubt still be consuming porn but from illicit sources

  • zoklet-enjoyer

    today at 6:07 PM

    That's what the private prisons are for!

• swiftcoder

  today at 6:20 PM

  So your position here is that we should take away their job, leaving them to suffer in abject poverty, while simultaneously banning wealthy Westerners from looking at shocked gasp tits?

  • bawolff

    today at 6:21 PM

    You can never tell for sure on the internet - but i would assume the person you were replying to was being sarcastic.

• Barrin92

  today at 6:22 PM

  you couldn't because someone who sexts people for 2$ an hour is always going to engage in wage slavery, and if that is what offends you, you could just ban it directly.

  We all know it's not the point though, you're just offended by porn, if she was cleaning floors for two bucks you wouldn't care. In fact her chatter job, on account of her doing it, is likely better than a lot of other work.

• soygem

  today at 6:16 PM

  [flagged]

Average wages in the Phillipines are around $360/month USD, so $2/hr isn't too bad for an easy job. BBC is playing rage-bait arbitrage with that headline.

I am still amazed that prostitution is legal when done online, and these teenage sex workers are allowed to continue selling themselves.

• beejiu

  today at 6:49 PM

  (a) It's not prostitution, and (b) while prostitution is illegal in the US it's perfectly legal in the UK and many other countries.

  • Invictus0

    today at 7:15 PM

    It's not illegal in the US

    • ghurtado

      today at 7:25 PM

      You're right - it's only 99.9% illegal

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_United_Sta...

• ghurtado

  today at 7:23 PM

  I am still amazed that there are people who think that drugs and prostitution will go away if we just make sure that they are illegal.

  Might as well add 'swearing' to that list.

Let me complain about how I'm being exploited at my job while voluntarily choosing said job over literally every other job available to me.

• swiftcoder

  today at 6:21 PM

  Please do enumerate these other jobs that are available to the Filipino currently performing this job for... checks notes... $2/hour?

  • mhb

    today at 6:28 PM

    Please say what you think the hourly average wage is in the Philippines and how you conclude that this isn't the woman's best option despite her revealed preference that it is.

    • swiftcoder

      today at 6:37 PM

      I don't think you and I are disagreeing here? The article explicitly states that she only took this work because she couldn't find other work, and that she dislikes the work intensely (... but has no better job prospects)

  • swarnie

    today at 7:14 PM

    > As of early 2026, the minimum wage in the Philippines is set daily rather than hourly and varies by region, with a common daily minimum of approximately 695 PHP in some sectors, often equating to less than $2 USD per hour

    Pretty much any Wagie job?

• mmooss

  today at 6:21 PM

  That's how exploitation works: The exploited don't have another choice. That doesn't make doing cruel things to them wrong and (hopefully) illegal.

  For example, someone could compel people who are starving to do all sorts of horrible things for food, and then say 'well, they chose to do it!'.

  • mhb

    today at 6:36 PM

    Once you make this job illegal, what do you think she does then for a job? By taking this job she has revealed that this is her best option. When you make the job illegal, you're forcing her to take a worse alternative.

  • dangus

    today at 6:37 PM

    This is true, but I also think that the information in the article alone is insufficient to make a judgment.

    This salary is over the Philippines minimum wage. It's a legal job like any other.

    The people interviewed are not super happy about the content of the job, but none of it seems to be anything more than it being pornography-related.

    Nobody's really seeming to cross any lines of illegality as described in the article. This doesn't come close to the kind of conditions faced by Meta's contractors in Africa spying through Meta glasses in private homes.

    I would equate this type of job to any type of job that has aspects that some people would never be willing to do.

    E.g., I would never be willing to be a window washer. I'm too scared of heights. Same deal with tower construction. But there are plenty of people doing those jobs who don't feel exploited.

    The plus side of jobs like this are that you can do this work at home, you can be physically disabled, there's often some level of flexibility of hours, and there's no manual labor.

    I'm going to guess that the only scandal here is that the Philippines is 80% Catholic and possibly more conservative than people in the countries where OnlyFans generates its income.

    • layer8

      today at 7:11 PM

      What crosses the line is that, as stated in the article, the job is a dishonest scam towards the clients.