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
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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
Talking to a real human seems more depressing to me, especially when they're making less than $2/hour doing it 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 "talking" to you.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Para-“ means “around” or “beside,” kind of in the sense of “close to.” In this specific context, American psychiatrists Horton and Wohl (1956) [0] introduced the notion of “parasocial interactions” to describe audience members’ intensifying, one-sided sensations-of-relationships with media characters as American-style mass media came into its own.
In the mid-2010s social scientists began to use the idea to think about the emerging class of even-more-intimate, confessional celebrities, like the Kardashians, as they started to use the socials ‘round the clock [1]. “Healthy” doesn’t seem to be the word they tend to choose.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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].
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.
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.
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)
> 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
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.
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.
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
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
There is probably some lingo somewhere clarifying that you pay for the "experience" of her and not for her in particular.
I wonder to what extent the clients care. Either way its still paying for a fantasy.
Do we know if onlyfan is already training their own models with their user's content?
How could they not be? At $2 an hour they'd be leaving money on the table by not paying a tiny fraction of that for an LLM.
That's why China ban this service outright? But hey, America is a democratic and freedom land.
2$ 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.
God that's depressing. Even when you _pay_ for human connection you're being fobbed off onto an AI
Bet you had some really deep human connection with that guy chatting to you from the Philippines.
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
Talking to a real human seems more depressing to me, especially when they're making less than $2/hour doing it 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 "talking" to you.
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.
>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.
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.
There will be some interesting game theory studies in the aftermath.
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.
What do you mean by "human connection"?
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.
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.
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.
What does "para-" mean?
Edit: Right, 'beside', 'outside', like in paranormal. Now, are parasocial relationships "human connection"?
“Para-“ means “around” or “beside,” kind of in the sense of “close to.” In this specific context, American psychiatrists Horton and Wohl (1956) [0] introduced the notion of “parasocial interactions” to describe audience members’ intensifying, one-sided sensations-of-relationships with media characters as American-style mass media came into its own.
In the mid-2010s social scientists began to use the idea to think about the emerging class of even-more-intimate, confessional celebrities, like the Kardashians, as they started to use the socials ‘round the clock [1]. “Healthy” doesn’t seem to be the word they tend to choose.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00332747.1956.11...
[1] https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research_all/7/
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
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.
That's pretty smart.
Does that mean that people do not recognize that some of the content is AI? Or do they simply accept it?
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
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
(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.
It's not illegal in the US
You're right - it's only 99.9% illegal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_United_Sta...
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.
Please do enumerate these other jobs that are available to the Filipino currently performing this job for... checks notes... $2/hour?
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.
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)
> 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?
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!'.
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.
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.
What crosses the line is that, as stated in the article, the job is a dishonest scam towards the clients.