Sex workers, ‘chatters’ and the dark art of deception on OnlyFans

On a balmy Wednesday last August I opened up the encrypted messaging app Telegram on my phone to find a 77-page document that was going to teach me how to exploit and manipulate lonely men for money.

“Make the fan feel like he can trust you more than anyone else in the world,” it instructed. “Our number one goal in this job is to make them dream and hope that they can still get a real girlfriend.”

What I had received was a manual from an agency employing “chatters”, a term used for the ghostwriters whom sex workers employ to respond to messages from their subscribers on OnlyFans as though it was the sex workers themselves. To get hold of the document I’d created a fake profile and gone undercover. In reality I’m a journalist who focuses on sex and relationships for The News Movement — an outlet focused on bringing reliable news to Generation Z via social media.

OnlyFans comes up a lot in my work. Founded in the UK in 2016, it calls itself a subscription social network, and although it’s not exclusively devoted to explicit adult material — celebrities such as the tennis star Nick Kyrgios and the Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B have set up OnlyFans accounts — a huge proportion of its business is generated from the fact it houses homegrown porn.

In a few years the site has revolutionised and democratised the online sex industry. In excess of three million people create content on OnlyFans, and more than 220 million people use the platform, generating payments of £4.4 billion in 2022; OnlyFans takes a 20 per cent cut of the revenue, the rest goes to the content creators.

The allure of the large sums of money that can be made on OnlyFans is so strong that people who may not have once countenanced sex work now use the platform. People like Alanya, 27, a former paralegal.

I met Alanya outside our Camden office. I couldn’t help but notice how similar we were and we immediately bonded. A year apart in age, using the same TikTok vernacular, giggling in the mirror as we applied make-up prior to filming our interview — in another life we’d be friends.

She told me she had worked at a law firm for five years before she was put on furlough during the pandemic — and that in just one month on OnlyFans she could make her annual wage as a paralegal.
“I think everyone learnt about OnlyFans at the same time and it kind of blew up,” she said. “I got in before it was too saturated. Now it’s like everyone’s on bloody OnlyFans.”

As her account grew, so did her inbox. Aside from paying a subscription to see your favourite models’ content, OnlyFans also allows users to send direct messages. This is where big money can be made — fans can tip models and pay to see more explicit videos.

Alanya was receiving messages from up to 70 people a day, so to help to manage her account she signed up with an agency, which offered chatters as part of its service.

Many accounts operate 24/7, with some agencies I spoke to hiring chatters in different time zones to ensure round-the-clock money-making. I’ve spoken to ghostwriters working in developing countries, for instance, who are being paid as little as a dollar an hour to “chat” to fans.

Bjorn Olsen runs an agency, although not the one that sent me its 77-page work manual. He hires his “virtual assistants” mainly from the Philippines, which, he tells me candidly, is so that he can pay them “as little as possible … that is still comfortable for them”.

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Olsen spoke to me from a hotel room in Australia, the small crucifix dangling from his ear rocking back and forth as he chuckled at being labelled a “pimp” by an Australian newspaper, which, he has said on Instagram, he has chosen to interpret as “positively inspirational and motivating person”.

He told me that he could scale an account for a model earning a couple of hundred pounds a month to about £25,000 with the help of his chatters. He half-smiled as he questioned the credulity of anyone who believed that a model with hundreds of subscribers could be “up 24/7 chatting all the time”.

“Now how do I sleep at night when it comes to deceiving these OnlyFans subscribers? The way I see it is that they’re still getting what they want — they’re getting the models’ content that they’ve paid for, and they’re also getting the attention that they signed up for. They’re just not getting it from who they think it’s from. I’m not sure how to justify that or say that it’s right, but no one is getting stooged, ’cause they’re still getting what they want.”

That was his justification, but what about those actually working at the interface between the sex workers and their fans?

I tracked down a former chatter from a different agency, who wishes to remain anonymous — let’s call him Rob. He is British, his WhatsApp picture shows a man standing proudly with his wife and children and he works in sales — but before that he worked as a chatter. After eight months he had had enough. “There’s a lot of dark stuff out there,” Rob said. “A lot.”

Although the agency he worked for did not have an extensive guidebook for him to follow, it did provide him with brief scripts covering different fetishes, kinks and scenarios for him to memorise and employ when speaking to fans. “Some of [the fans] want to be abused — so then you’re angry, like a bit of a dominatrix,” he said. “Some of them want to be the dominant one, so then you become the innocent girl.”

He told me the agency he had worked for had chatters on shift around the clock for different models, and that the managers, one of whom was just 19 years old, were constantly “belittling everyone and swearing at the models, but they were tied into the contracts so couldn’t leave”. This agency, unlike others I’d heard about, seemed to have set up a system whereby the models were contractually bound to them and didn’t have control over their profiles or eyes on their income stream.

Having befriended the agency’s owner, Rob gleaned further insights about the business. “The manager told me that when the model signs up, for the first six months she gets paid £50k. When it gets to the end of her contract, they just get a new model in. All that time the model thinks she’s making £50k, but her account is actually making £200k and he’s just pocketing the rest.”

Meanwhile the chatters, he said, were encouraged to “scam” as much money as they could out of people, and warned that if they didn’t make at least £80 in tips an hour they would be sacked.

For Rob, though, it wasn’t the unscrupulous business practices that led him to quit. “What got me was the things fans would do to themselves. You can tell they’re lonely, you can see the state of their houses, they’d be torturing themselves physically and getting off on it.”

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As I investigated the world of chatters, I was struck by the industrial scale of what seemed to be taking place. How, I wondered, were so many men so thoroughly duped? How was it that a man from Manila, say, could convince fans he was a 20-year-old female model in London?

The document that I’d obtained via my fake profile laid it out. It wasn’t just a handbook on how to sext. It was an explicit manual on how to exploit, lie and manipulate. From the first page it was a jaw-dropping read.

“If you are not comfortable with lying to people, this is the moment where you should stop reading, and stop working in this business,” it stated. “Because this business is STRAIGHT lying to people.”

The author of the document even outlined the kind of person being targeted — a 30-year-old man with a busy job, no time for friends and no success with women. Bad experiences with women, heartbreaks, terrible sex — or no sex at all. “Those kinds of men are our customers,” it said. “They are very sensible and careful men. They will NOT trust a woman easily.”

The challenge was to create the illusion that the model was “just a girl, sitting on her sofa, watching Netflix, drinking coffee” — waiting to interact with her subscribers. And if a fan became suspicious? The document explained how the model might still be up at 4am (she couldn’t sleep) or was unable to send bespoke content (they have roommates and don’t want them to hear) etc.

It included rules and techniques for speaking to fans, scripts for every imaginable kink, from Harry Potter fetishes to public masturbation. But what shocked me was not the salaciousness of the content — I’ve seen my fair share of it in my role — it was the dark psychological manipulation that was being preached.

One section was entitled “The Enslavement Aspect” — its purpose was to teach chatters how to “use psychological manipulation to take the fan in and out of a trance until he becomes emotionally addicted to you and you’ve entered his subconsciousness”. Another part detailed “The Implanted Commands Technique”, where “you’ll be able to access parts of the fan’s mind which are usually closed and protected by his natural inhibitions”.

“There were people we called ‘husbands’,” Rob told me. “They were in love with the model and thought one day they were going to meet, get married and have kids.

“They were nice, sad, lonely men. I felt really guilty. They would send over their entire wage, and we would make a note of how much they earnt on their payday and how much to take from them.”

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I wondered if OnlyFans was aware of the treatment of such people, and what it felt about it. When I approached the company, it responded that “OnlyFans provides creators with a platform to monetise their content and engage with their fan base. Our relationship is with the content creators and OnlyFans is not affiliated with and does not endorse any third parties.” Furthermore, it pointed out that the platform prohibits “misleading or deceptive conduct or conduct that is likely to mislead or deceive any other user”, and advised anyone who was unhappy with the content or messages to report it.

In a world where sex sells, driving a huge share of the world economy, you can understand the allure of OnlyFans for young women who choose to make money this way, and even that third parties might seek to scale up profits. But you still feel sorry for the men being duped.

Alanya had told me how the chatters on her account had built up such an intimate relationship with one of her subscribers that he had taken a flight to Scotland, then hired a car and driven 400 miles to the area she lived in the hope of meeting her.

“I had such bad anxiety the whole time he was there, thinking I’d bump into him,” Alanya said. “How do you explain that? How do you explain, oh, I’ve been taking your money, but you haven’t actually been talking to me? He kept texting me asking me what he’d done wrong. It broke his heart.

“I don’t know what would have happened if I’d seen him. Would he have been nice? Would he have been horrible?”

Alanya told me that the chatters had been telling him that they loved him. She told me if it had been her she’d never have let it get that far.

Would she ever use chatters again? It was an “absolute no go”, she said.
Watch Sophie Peachey’s OnlyFans documentary for The News Movement on YouTube