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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
You mean it's equally fraud as that. Fraud has a particular definition which does not permit "someone else is committing fraud and getting away with it" as a defense.
Someone paid to have a fantasy of sex, and they got that fantasy. If they don't like it, they don't do it again, and this is true whether it's "the model" or someone else. If they do like it, what's the issue?
This is like saying you paid for a celebrity plumber & a regular plumber did the work, but you're upset because you wanted the celebrity. "The job" got done one way or another. They're selling digital handjobs here, there's no need to be precious about it.
Are you serious? However goofy that sounds, they paid for a specific fantasy. They would not have paid if you advertised the service as "talk dirty with a random dude in India". If the reason they paid for this service is that they were promised a specific person, that's fraud. As simple as that.
Your judgment about whether the services are equivalent doesn't matter. If I pay you for Gucci socks, and you intentionally send me cheaper HZBZZYXY socks from Amazon instead, that's fraud even if they're still socks.
I have some models I really chat with, like outside of their performances. Not all day obviously and they often don't respond for days but that's ok. I know it's them because I can see them typing live sometimes and also some of them I know in person and they remember what I've said online.
> I can’t believe that someone paying for this actually expects to chat with the model. Just think of the logistics, it would be impossible
It's not impossible, you can do it with a little bit of fine tuning starting from her history of chats on the platform, and having her set a custom user-level prompt where she lists her interests, hobbies and things she likes. Then give her auto-compacted daily or weekly summaries of the most compelling chats. It's a model either way, right?
You’ve not even begun to scratch parasocial relationships- since there have been cases of murder, I think it’s safe to assume at least some think they’re really chatting with the model - and she loves them?
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.
That's only really in jurisdictions where it's illegal. It just comes with the criminal aspect. In Holland they even have a union called the red thread.
On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, personal touch doesn't scale. Webcam models maintain a personal touch by broadcasting their interactions with those who tip, but OF models can't do that. They have two options when their customer base grows too large:
Option one is to use these chatters.
Option two is to chat only with those who pay extra or with no one at all.
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..
>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).
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.
> It sounds like Onlyfans is exploiting workers and their own customers.
But this is the basic principle of capitalism. The company exploits workers (in order to obtain a net benefit from their work), and exploits customers (by selling the lowest-quality, most expensive product it can manage to). Companies that don't behave like that get out-competed by companies that do. This dynamic is the root of our economic system, as was very clearly explained by Adam Smith and Karl Marx two centuries ago (in slightly different tones of voice).
The particular case you mention is nothing special. The exact same thing happens for all the products that people buy. This is just the stable state of our (some would say "rotten", some would say "healthy") society.
It’s not exploitation unless the participants in the deal are being coerced. You can’t make a solid case for employees being coerced to work for an exploitative employer outside of company towns or non-functioning labor markets; neither of these apply to the Philippines.
If the chatter thought the job was so bad, they can quit and get a different one. Millions of people make that choice, it is available to them. There is no requirement that they do this work; it is entirely voluntary. The people doing these jobs have determined that it is the best option for them, personally, or they wouldn’t be there.
PS: $2-4/hr is a more than decent wage in the Philippines. Median income there is $2.11/hr, minimum wage is $1.36/hr.
The problem with Marxian exploitation is that a better system can provide you with more luxuries beyond basic needs.
If you're buying a fancy car and capitalism makes you pay 50% more for the car, calling it exploitation is silly when the communist part of Germany only offers a waiting list for a Trabant. You can't complain about being exploited over luxuries.
This leaves just housing, food, energy, education and healthcare. Other than energy, those things suck in the US, but they are very reasonably priced in Germany.
Marxian exploitation is also incompatible with economic equilibrium, which means that a better solution than communism is to introduce equilibrium into our economies and not just declare equilibrium to be automatic.
It is fraud but nobody cares anymore. Laws only matter if you're defrauding rich corporations with pockets deep enough to actually pay lawyers to sue you over it.
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.
But in this case its not OnlyFans doing the (potential?) fraud, it's the individual performers and potentially their agencies. OnlyFans just provide the platform and turn a blind eye.
It might be fraud, but it’s hard to drum up sympathy for internet perverts. Imagine a guy in his 50s believing an 18-year-old with thousands of followers is personally texting him. It’s pure delusion - like going to a strip club and thinking the girls are actually into you. There are no innocent victims on these sites, just losers looking to exploit someone. Maybe them getting exploited instead is just poetic justice.
It might be fraud, but it’s hard to muster up sympathy for perverts on the internet. Imagine guys in their 50s who actually think an 18-year-old girl is talking to them. There are no innocent people on porn sites — just losers looking to exploit. Maybe it's just poetic justice that they're the ones getting exploited, no?
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.
Saw a funny video [0] in the music-adjacent part of YouTube about an Instagram trend when man record themselves playing a musical instrument (usually guitar), then use AI video editing to turn themselves into scantily clad women and use these videos to lure people into viewing their adult content (also AI generated).
I noticed this thing on Youtube in general with cover images and I've always wondered if it was the content creator that does it or Youtube's platform. I find it both depressing and understandable that this is the kind of content that gets the most views.
Scroll down a bit and you'll see all of the images have the exact same face plastered on a clearly AI body and the account is posting new photos multiple times per day.
And every single post has thousands of likes and hundreds of messages from actual humans. People either don't notice the obvious fakes or don't care.
Instagram is similar, you don't need to go far to find extremely obvious AI generated "people" with big accounts and links to OF accounts. There's no way to report these either, because Meta doesn't care.
Ironically, I was trying to explain to someone I know that was somewhat considering getting into that milieu that what such people are really doing is selling affection to an affection deprived audience. Every person that sells themselves has the same orifices and they more or less all look the same, and everyone has seen thousands of them by now. The differentiation is the connection and being able to identify the particular sad void needing to be fill.
AI will make this really bad, because it will surely quickly learn how to tap into your deepest impulses and desires for connection and affection. It sounds weird, but in a way, there is some strong correlation between other forms of fraud, the most obvious being romance cons/frauds; where women are not looking for big rods, but for romance lady boners... yet another form of seeing affection.
Some of us harm ourselves for a lack of an affection, others fall prey to it making them vulnerable. I do hope that AI could and will also be used to help people get a semblance of healthy affection, if not maybe even facilitate making real connections that can provide real human affection.
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.
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.
This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to seedy OF behaviors. The goal of the most successful OF chatters and chatting is to develop parasocial romantic relationships with highly invested whales who then go into debt due to their obsession. Many fans do it hoping they'll one day be with the girl in real life (and this is insinuated and propagated by the chatting team). Fans will rack up credit card debt and in extreme cases, have been cited to take out loans or sell their possessions to continue purchasing. Overtime, such whales are tracked by the agency via advanced CRMs where they are then shuffled from account to account via shout outs on the model's accounts.
If you want to directly address this chatter's grievances, the going rate for most chatters is $3+/hour + commissions. I won't share links but this can be found via Telegram or Google. ~$500/mo base is pretty good for the Philippines when call centers make you work 6 days a week for the same price without commission.
Yeah I saw one of these online. An onlyfans performer was livestreaming on another platform, clearly not typing and at the same time chatted me up on onlyfans lol. Clearly it wasn't her herself. I kinda strung "her" on and she sent me some obvious stock pics saying "she" was out on the town.
I only pay genuine performers, some of whom I even know in person. I only subscribed to the above one because it was a free sub. But I was kinda appalled. First I thought it was a chatbot but it probably was a person like this.
For me the connection is a lot more important than the erotic content. But it's pretty easy to weed them out for now. Maybe this will change with better AI. I hope not.
You’ll be shocked to see how many job postings for only fans chatters are up on Reddit when you search for them (several are posted every hour). Some ads are looking for 10-20 chatters at once.
But the people taking on these jobs are applying for them still. Somehow I find it hard to be sympathetic? Ok I get it the job opportunities in the Philippines aren’t great, but it’s not like you’re being forced to be an OF chatter; you can simply stop being one.
The sad thing about AI usage and the lack of jobs here in the poorer part of the world is that around the $6 mark per hour there would be literal queues of people forming to sign up for the job.
At about the $10-12 mark you'd be able to hire people with serious linguistic skills.
Readit News
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
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.
I would argue that the reason has more to do with our utter inability to create common sense laws regarding anything "sex".
Later scams evolved to use prerecorded video clips etc. Which I assume is next for OF also.
[0] https://www.courtwatch.news/p/onlyfans-sued-after-two-guys-r...
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/court-throws-explosive-o...
This is like saying you paid for a celebrity plumber & a regular plumber did the work, but you're upset because you wanted the celebrity. "The job" got done one way or another. They're selling digital handjobs here, there's no need to be precious about it.
Are you serious? However goofy that sounds, they paid for a specific fantasy. They would not have paid if you advertised the service as "talk dirty with a random dude in India". If the reason they paid for this service is that they were promised a specific person, that's fraud. As simple as that.
Your judgment about whether the services are equivalent doesn't matter. If I pay you for Gucci socks, and you intentionally send me cheaper HZBZZYXY socks from Amazon instead, that's fraud even if they're still socks.
It's not impossible, you can do it with a little bit of fine tuning starting from her history of chats on the platform, and having her set a custom user-level prompt where she lists her interests, hobbies and things she likes. Then give her auto-compacted daily or weekly summaries of the most compelling chats. It's a model either way, right?
Dead Comment
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.
Option one is to use these chatters.
Option two is to chat only with those who pay extra or with no one at all.
Being unable to sell 30 hours of work in a day is normal, not an excuse for fraud.
Dead Comment
these people probably know they're not talking to the real model, but want someone to talk to.
someone insert Blaise Pascal quote
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
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Deleted Comment
But this is the basic principle of capitalism. The company exploits workers (in order to obtain a net benefit from their work), and exploits customers (by selling the lowest-quality, most expensive product it can manage to). Companies that don't behave like that get out-competed by companies that do. This dynamic is the root of our economic system, as was very clearly explained by Adam Smith and Karl Marx two centuries ago (in slightly different tones of voice).
The particular case you mention is nothing special. The exact same thing happens for all the products that people buy. This is just the stable state of our (some would say "rotten", some would say "healthy") society.
If the chatter thought the job was so bad, they can quit and get a different one. Millions of people make that choice, it is available to them. There is no requirement that they do this work; it is entirely voluntary. The people doing these jobs have determined that it is the best option for them, personally, or they wouldn’t be there.
PS: $2-4/hr is a more than decent wage in the Philippines. Median income there is $2.11/hr, minimum wage is $1.36/hr.
If you're buying a fancy car and capitalism makes you pay 50% more for the car, calling it exploitation is silly when the communist part of Germany only offers a waiting list for a Trabant. You can't complain about being exploited over luxuries.
This leaves just housing, food, energy, education and healthcare. Other than energy, those things suck in the US, but they are very reasonably priced in Germany.
Marxian exploitation is also incompatible with economic equilibrium, which means that a better solution than communism is to introduce equilibrium into our economies and not just declare equilibrium to be automatic.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqrJgjrBV2I (it's a very short video, only 45 seconds)
Scroll down a bit and you'll see all of the images have the exact same face plastered on a clearly AI body and the account is posting new photos multiple times per day.
And every single post has thousands of likes and hundreds of messages from actual humans. People either don't notice the obvious fakes or don't care.
Instagram is similar, you don't need to go far to find extremely obvious AI generated "people" with big accounts and links to OF accounts. There's no way to report these either, because Meta doesn't care.
AI will make this really bad, because it will surely quickly learn how to tap into your deepest impulses and desires for connection and affection. It sounds weird, but in a way, there is some strong correlation between other forms of fraud, the most obvious being romance cons/frauds; where women are not looking for big rods, but for romance lady boners... yet another form of seeing affection.
Some of us harm ourselves for a lack of an affection, others fall prey to it making them vulnerable. I do hope that AI could and will also be used to help people get a semblance of healthy affection, if not maybe even facilitate making real connections that can provide real human affection.
At OnlyFans you're paying for a video feed, and computers are pretty good at producing convincing video feeds now.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke
If you want to directly address this chatter's grievances, the going rate for most chatters is $3+/hour + commissions. I won't share links but this can be found via Telegram or Google. ~$500/mo base is pretty good for the Philippines when call centers make you work 6 days a week for the same price without commission.
I only pay genuine performers, some of whom I even know in person. I only subscribed to the above one because it was a free sub. But I was kinda appalled. First I thought it was a chatbot but it probably was a person like this.
For me the connection is a lot more important than the erotic content. But it's pretty easy to weed them out for now. Maybe this will change with better AI. I hope not.
> 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.
UK: gambling and porn
Europe: luxury goods
US: advertising and retail e-commerce
China: direct from manufacturer commerce
But the people taking on these jobs are applying for them still. Somehow I find it hard to be sympathetic? Ok I get it the job opportunities in the Philippines aren’t great, but it’s not like you’re being forced to be an OF chatter; you can simply stop being one.
At about the $10-12 mark you'd be able to hire people with serious linguistic skills.