StopFraud is almost untraceable. It describes itself as a “fast-growing, U.S.-based company” in ads posted on a Ukrainian jobs website, but Reuters could find no business registration for it in the U.S., the UK or Ukraine. The firm could not be reached for comment.
OnlyFans doesn’t publicly acknowledge any relationship with StopFraud, and StopFraud’s website doesn’t mention OnlyFans. Several former StopFraud workers told Reuters they knew little about their employer. They worked from home, moderating content and vetting creators. They knew their colleagues only by nickname. One said the clandestine conditions made her feel like a “spy.” Others declined interviews, saying they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
Hembry said his UK-based content-moderation team was phased out as Ukrainian contractors took over, and he briefly moved to a job handling relations with top creators. But he could still check the queue where content awaited review, he said. Just before he was laid off in 2022, he said, the queue contained millions of items – at least 50 times the normal load he had seen the year before. He said he couldn’t see how the Ukrainian contractors would get the job done. It’s unclear how the war affected their work. After it broke out, Blair has said, OnlyFans relocated “a number of people” from Ukraine to neighboring Poland.
By 2022, OnlyFans publicly said it was building “the world’s safest social media platform.” In July that year, it told Ofcom, the British media regulator, that while it relied on automation to flag problems, all content was ultimately reviewed by a human moderator.
At a site with OnlyFans’ volume of content, that task was “virtually impossible” without hiring “thousands of moderators,” said Jason Pomales, former director of trust and safety at Vimeo, a prominent video-sharing platform. “And that’s a huge cost.”
Four other content moderation experts agreed that OnlyFans’ claim of blanket human review was implausible. In November alone, the website said it uploaded almost 55 million pieces of content.
OnlyFans’ moderation process, meanwhile, remains murky. It says 80% of its workforce consists of “trained content moderators,” but the company doesn’t divulge publicly the size of that workforce or how moderators are trained. That makes OnlyFans’ claims about the effectiveness of its moderation difficult for outsiders to verify.
Ofcom has collected information about moderation and other business operations directly from OnlyFans. Some of that information – including the platform’s moderation staffing levels – hasn’t been published, Ofcom said, because the law restricts what it can disclose without the consent of the businesses it regulates. However, a spokesperson added: “It’s our current understanding that every piece of content (on OnlyFans) is ultimately moderated by a human.”
SKITTISH BANKS
As OnlyFans’ popularity grew, illegal content was slipping by its moderators. People were complaining to police of abuses on the platform. The BBC had found children on the site. And OnlyFans’ bankers appeared nervous.
In August 2021, the company dropped a bombshell announcement: it would ban porn as of that October. Offering few details, the company said it was seeking to comply with requests from banking partners and payment providers. In an interview with the Financial Times, Tim Stokely blamed “unfair” treatment by banks that had flagged and rejected OnlyFans payments to its creators due to reputational risk.
The proposed ban outraged porn creators. Many felt betrayed. Lauren Phillips, an American creator who joined OnlyFans early on, said she felt like the company wanted “to use us and then throw us away.”
Six days later, OnlyFans abruptly retracted the ban, saying it had secured the “assurances necessary” to support its creators. It didn’t explain what those assurances were or who gave them. But removing porn would have crippled the platform – and cut off a growing stream of revenue for the banks handling OnlyFans’ business.
Still, it remained an uphill struggle to convince potential banking partners that porn on OnlyFans wasn’t a smokescreen for abuse, some bankers said.
In the spring of 2023, intermediaries for OnlyFans spoke with several Wall Street investment banks to explore the possibility of partnerships, according to three people involved. One said taking OnlyFans public was discussed; the others told Reuters that the intermediaries were seeking major banks to help process payments for OnlyFans.
$472 million
OnlyFans’ dividend payout of $472 million to Radvinsky was more than Ralph Lauren earned from the fashion company he founded and Nike co-founder Phil Knight earned from the sportswear giant – combined.
By then, OnlyFans had eye-popping numbers: over a billion dollars in revenue, over half a billion in operating profit. Bankers would have typically fought for such business. But the talks went nowhere. The hitch, according to two of those involved, was OnlyFans’ main product: porn.
Porn makes OnlyFans untouchable for many big banks and investors, said six bankers, lawyers and other investors, all with expertise in capital markets but no ties to OnlyFans, who spoke with Reuters on condition they and their employers not be named. Four expressed concern that any due diligence done on the platform might find illegal content such as child sexual abuse material, trafficking victims and nonconsensual porn.
OnlyFans has since said it has no plans to go public. Business is booming. In 2023, content creators generated $6.6 billion on the platform. The company had more than enough free cash flow to remain privately held. Its dividend payout of $472 million to Radvinsky was more than Ralph Lauren earned from the fashion company he founded and Nike co-founder Phil Knight earned from the sportswear giant – combined.
As a reclusive porn mogul, Radvinsky isn’t usually mentioned in the same breath as the world’s eminent billionaires. But he has suggested he would like it to be.
Big bang
“My goal is to one day be in a position to sign The Giving Pledge,” he says on one website that appears to belong to him, referring to promises made by Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg and other tycoons to give away most of their wealth to charitable causes.
Rebuffed by Wall Street, OnlyFans continued its efforts to become a mainstream company, seeking to convince the world that its porn was safe – and that OnlyFans was more than a porn site.
That job fell to its CEO, Keily Blair.