The OnlyFans Mirage: Organised Crime Corrupts the Adult Platform by Sol Prendido
The alarm bells started ringing two hours after classes ended at a private school in Monterrey, Nuevo León, and Cindy Elizabeth Hernández López’s son was still in the playground. It wasn’t common for the boy to be left waiting so long to go home, so the principal started calling his mother to see if, due to her busy schedule, she had forgotten to pick him up. Something unusual was going on with the young mother, known online as “La Barbie Regia” (The Monterrey Barbie).
The suspicion of trouble intensified when her phone went straight to voicemail. Despite her heavy workload, she was always available to the teachers. Disappearing was not typical for this model and adult content creator, a “businesswoman at heart” on OnlyFans, as she described herself. She maintained contact with her loved ones, friends, and hundreds of thousands of fans on social media.
After several hours without locating her, a family member rushed to pick up the child and waited all afternoon and night of October 3, 2024, hoping she would reappear alive.
The following morning, desperate because of the silence, the family went to Cindy Elizabeth’s apartment in the Leones neighborhood. Accompanied by police officers, they opened the door and found their worst fear: the young woman lay dead in her bedroom. Just 21 hours earlier, she had posted her last photo on X with the caption, “Good afternoon. Available today 6:30 p.m. and/or 7:30 p.m.”
“La Barbie Regia”, an OnlyFans model, was the victim of a femicide linked to organised crime.
The femicide shocked her community of followers, who paid $14.99 every month without fail to watch her pose in lingerie and other sexual content she filmed in hotels in Nuevo León, Mexico City, Puebla, and other states. Pressure on local authorities led the prosecutor’s office to “solve” the case in just seven days: the killer, according to the official version, was a rideshare driver who murdered her to steal 15,000 pesos.
But the robbery motive didn’t seem credible. The body of “La Barbie Regia” showed signs of extreme violence: deep cuts, bruises, torture, and she was naked. Some media outlets reported that her head was covered with a pillow; others that her throat had been slit. A femicide bearing the signature of organized crime.
The Nuevo León prosecutor’s office opened a new line of investigation that is still ongoing: the motive for the crime appears to be linked to adult content, meaning that the killer may have used OnlyFans to contact her, deceive her—perhaps sexually exploit her—and murder her.
Dark Stories in the World of OnlyFans
Conceived in 2015 and launched globally in 2016, the OnlyFans platform opened its doors to the internet with an apparently benevolent mission: to empower content creators without traditional channels to reach a young audience in the digital world.
It wasn’t always the preferred channel for those who create adult photos and videos, but the permissiveness regarding explicit content quickly established it as a favorite site for both “professional” and amateur porn actors. Also, with remarkable speed, organized crime groups from around the world saw opportunities to establish their human exploitation and money laundering operations there.
Nine years after OnlyFans’ debut, it’s easy to find disturbing stories online: models—both men and women—sexually exploited under the guise of financial gain, illicit content involving minors, fake profiles, and access to video libraries of real rapes with recurring credit card charges.
OnlyFans, the platform that promised freedom and ended up under the shadow of organised crime.
Young people kidnapped and held in apartments shared with other victims, their earnings ending up in the hands of clandestine groups. There are even cases of content creators trafficked from Moscow to Dubai. The list goes on.
In the United States, the State Department estimates that there are approximately 27.6 million victims of human trafficking worldwide. And with a global population exceeding 8 billion, people in modern slavery represent 0.345%. After the pandemic, nearly half of the world’s victims are trafficked online, in the world of OnlyFans.
Another disturbing statistic: The Polaris Project, which collects data on human trafficking survivors, indicated that 26% reported being exploited on their own social media accounts.
An estimated 14,214 victims are on the platform.
“Given that the platform is known for its sexual content, OnlyFans becomes another tool for human trafficking. In 2023, OnlyFans had 4.12 million creators and 305 million users. If we apply the aforementioned 0.345% to those creators, this suggests that there are approximately 14,214 victims of human trafficking on the platform,” states the global consulting firm Ankura.
Identifying these victims is a major challenge: content creators often don’t use their real names on their profiles, much less the criminals and their victims. And when the finances of individuals abducted are controlled by others, their accounts are usually located in countries where bank secrecy is difficult to break, even for authorities. However, there are clues that indicate that the mafia’s dark hand may be behind an Onlyfans account.
OnlyFans promised independence and security for its creators, but ended up being fertile ground for trafficking and money laundering.
Independent content creators can take photos in their own homes or outdoors, such as in luxury hotels, on beaches, or on boats. In contrast, victims of sexual exploitation create content in motels or apartments that appear to house multiple people, indicating that they don’t live in their own homes or have freedom of movement.
“Another constant element is the introduction or description. Each creator provides a brief description of the type of content they offer on their page. Pay attention to descriptions that offer in-person encounters, in-person sexual services, content with multiple partners, or that redirect to another site for more services. This may indicate that the OnlyFans profile wasn’t actually created to generate views, but rather as an advertisement for sexual exploitation.
“Speaking of advertisements, look for descriptions that use traditional advertising techniques, such as the excessive use of emojis (mainly sexual ones) and a large number of services with virtually no limits,” recommends the firm Ankura. Following that advice, we should look at the profile of ‘La Barbie Regia’: nine emojis in her X description alone, seven on Instagram, and a contact number that is now impossible to determine if she answered it exclusively or if it was managed by someone else. Her last message on X is another red flag: was she trying to fill a gap in her schedule, or was a third party hoping to profit from her online popularity?
When newspapers removed classified ads
At 15, Mixi’s life wasn’t one truth, but many versions. Sometimes, she posed as Paloma, an Argentinian exchange student in Mexico. Other times, she was called Rachel and was a Latina-American teenager deported to what was then the Federal District with her family. She also went by Karen or Sofía. She feigned a Spanish or Colombian accent. It all depended on what the man who wanted to pay to abuse her was looking for.
Since adolescence, she had learned to have many personalities to always please those exploitative clients looking for minors. They did so with the eyes of expert rapists, deciphering the key words that Mixi’s stepsister planted in the classified ads in the newspapers: “schoolgirl,” “young woman,” “student,” “visiting foreigner,” or “Lolita” meant that the “massage,” “companionship,” or “fun” was sex with someone who was underage and who was doing it against her will.
Advertisements for “massages” or “escorts” concealed stories like that of Mixi, a victim of trafficking since her teenage years.
“If they wanted me to be American, I was. If they wanted me to be 13, I was. If they wanted a Colombian girl, I had that too. My family taught me all of that.” “It was filled with the lives of so many women who didn’t exist, but at the same time, I felt empty,” Mixi said over coffee a few months ago for the podcast ‘Esquina Balderas.’ After nearly a year of being sexually exploited by her own family, her life took a turn in the winter of 2009 when a waiter at a Mexico City hotel saw her wandering the hallways, her eyes swollen from crying. The teenager confided in him that she had been kidnapped and that an exploitative client had beaten her for refusing to use a condom.
Iván hid her in an empty room, gave her his sweatshirt to hide from the cameras, and paid for a taxi so they could both escape the building, which had become a dungeon.
After hours of wandering the city, Mixi and Iván finally stopped at what was then the Attorney General’s Office of the Federal District, where they arranged for her transfer to the Camino a Casa shelter, where her recovery began.
In Mexico, four out of ten victims of sex trafficking are adolescents.
Her first act of survival was to ask the shelter’s founders to share her story nationwide: Mexico needed to know that alongside ads for used cars and jobs were paid advertisements from sex trafficking rings promoting their victims.
Thanks to her courage, in 2011 two major national newspapers eliminated the classified ads, a business that earned each of them some 20 million pesos a month, according to activist Rosi Orozco’s calculations. Other newspapers and magazines followed suit until the section was eliminated from the media altogether.
The measure generated mixed opinions: some felt it successfully shut down a channel used by organized crime to recruit and sell its victims, while others criticized it for blocking a way for sex workers to find clients without having to go to the streets, where they were at the mercy of traffickers and corrupt police officers.
Then the mafias began to take over the new virtual spaces.
Years passed before the internet solidified as a source of hope for sex workers: online, they thought, they could own their own virtual space without having to pay a pimp or madam any cut, only to the platform for their photos and profiles, just like paying for website hosting.
The first sites specializing in “dating” appeared, but they were quickly co-opted by organized crime, as happened with Match.com and ZonaDivas.com; social networks like Facebook and Instagram consolidated their power and were later sued for allowing paid encounters between minors and adults. The same happened with Tinder, Snapchat, and more. Sooner or later, every virtual space was taken over by mafias dedicated to prostitution and the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents.
The website advertised more than 500 women for sexual exploitation.
ZonaDivas.com was one of the most widely used websites by trafficking networks in Mexico before it was shut down in 2018.
Until a new lifeline emerged for independent sex work in London, UK: OnlyFans, the tool marketed as ideal for content creators to monetize their work through their followers. No intermediaries, no pimps. Just direct contact between digital creators and their fans.
The idea of no physical contact and digital payments seemed to finally solve the problem of organized crime infiltrating the sex market.
Only a few years were enough to confirm that, like dampness in a hotel room, organized crime advances through the smallest cracks and in the dark.
OnlyFans Lawsuits Around the World
In Romania, boxer Andrew Tate still faces charges in his country for rape and human trafficking for sexual exploitation, related to a network that allegedly forced women to create pornographic content for OnlyFans.
In Spain, British model Clara Wilson has been imprisoned since October, and will remain so for three more years, after admitting that she tried to bring Thai drugs into Barcelona for a criminal group that contacted her through her adult profile.
Andrew Tate, accused in Romania of rape and human trafficking, is alleged to have forced women to produce pornography for OnlyFans.
In the United Kingdom, since 2018, there have been allegations against a digital platform involving minors who, posing as adults over 21, sold pornography featuring teenagers. Similar allegations have surfaced in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, where the main suspicions of child sexual exploitation point to organized crime groups also involved in black markets such as arms and narcotics trafficking.
In Florida, United States, federal prosecutor Gregory W. Kehoe announced this year a formal indictment against content creator Kylie Leia Perez, also known as ‘Natalie Monroe,’ for tax evasion, which carries a maximum sentence of seven years in federal prison. She is accused of being part of a fraud ring.
“OnlyFans mimics a pyramid structure, where creators have incentives to recruit other creators, since they earn up to 5% of the new creator’s earnings. This means that OnlyFans creators have a vested interest in making life seem more glamorous than it actually is and in flooding social media with these messages,” asserts the Criminal Intelligence Initiative Against Human Trafficking.
In Ecuador, model and influencer Derly Figueroa was shot and killed on July 12, 2022, in Babahoyo, Los Ríos province. Two hitmen on a motorcycle intercepted her while she was talking with friends and murdered her in front of her daughter. That same year, she had survived an attack that allegedly originated on OnlyFans and was related to the extortion of content creators.
In Australia, a coalition of experts and academics from the University of New South Wales have publicly expressed concern that clandestine groups are using OnlyFans to launder illicit funds.
Sinaloa Cartel’s Dirty Money on OnlyFans
In Mexico, during the tenure of Pablo Gómez, a member of the Morena party, as head of the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Finance, 62 profiles of “narco-influencers” were identified. These profiles were allegedly artificially inflated with dirty money from factions of the Sinaloa Cartel to obtain laundered funds from social media platforms. This simple money laundering scheme was reportedly used by at least three OnlyFans content creators.
Also, since September, the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office has been investigating OnlyFans’ role in the murder of Colombian musicians B-King and DJ Regio Clown. A model, Angelica Yetsey Torrini Leon, was identified as an accomplice of the hitmen.
Angie Miller and B-King were murdered in Mexico City; the case points to links with OnlyFans.
While authorities in Mexico and around the world are figuring out how to catch organized crime in the world of online subscriptions, a new type of mobster is emerging: the “e-pimp” or “digital pimp,” that is, employees of “full-service agencies” who charge OnlyFans content creators—sometimes real women and sometimes profiles deceptively created with Artificial Intelligence—a fee to promote them.
They do the same thing as a street trafficker, but online: they promote services, collect payment upfront, take a cut, and claim to provide security. They are usually older men working from their homes, glued to a computer, posing as young and beautiful women selling erotic content. And if they find someone willing to pay for something more, like a video of a minor or a rape, they will simply raise the price and make it happen. In the world of online organized crime, the fan is always right.
Source: Milenio, Cartel Insider, Cartel Insider
The post The OnlyFans Mirage: Organised Crime Corrupts the Adult Platform appeared first on Cartel Insider.
The alarm bells started ringing two hours after classes ended at a private school in Monterrey, Nuevo León, and Cindy Elizabeth Hernández López’s son was still in the playground. It wasn’t common for the boy to be left waiting so long to go home, so the principal started calling his mother to see if, due to her busy schedule, she had forgotten to pick him up. Something unusual was going on with the young mother, known online as “La Barbie Regia” (The Monterrey Barbie).
The suspicion of trouble intensified when her phone went straight to voicemail. Despite her heavy workload, she was always available to the teachers. Disappearing was not typical for this model and adult content creator, a “businesswoman at heart” on OnlyFans, as she described herself. She maintained contact with her loved ones, friends, and hundreds of thousands of fans on social media.
After several hours without locating her, a family member rushed to pick up the child and waited all afternoon and night of October 3, 2024, hoping she would reappear alive.
The following morning, desperate because of the silence, the family went to Cindy Elizabeth’s apartment in the Leones neighborhood. Accompanied by police officers, they opened the door and found their worst fear: the young woman lay dead in her bedroom. Just 21 hours earlier, she had posted her last photo on X with the caption, “Good afternoon. Available today 6:30 p.m. and/or 7:30 p.m.”
“La Barbie Regia”, an OnlyFans model, was the victim of a femicide linked to organised crime.
The femicide shocked her community of followers, who paid $14.99 every month without fail to watch her pose in lingerie and other sexual content she filmed in hotels in Nuevo León, Mexico City, Puebla, and other states. Pressure on local authorities led the prosecutor’s office to “solve” the case in just seven days: the killer, according to the official version, was a rideshare driver who murdered her to steal 15,000 pesos.
But the robbery motive didn’t seem credible. The body of “La Barbie Regia” showed signs of extreme violence: deep cuts, bruises, torture, and she was naked. Some media outlets reported that her head was covered with a pillow; others that her throat had been slit. A femicide bearing the signature of organized crime.
The Nuevo León prosecutor’s office opened a new line of investigation that is still ongoing: the motive for the crime appears to be linked to adult content, meaning that the killer may have used OnlyFans to contact her, deceive her—perhaps sexually exploit her—and murder her.
Dark Stories in the World of OnlyFans
Conceived in 2015 and launched globally in 2016, the OnlyFans platform opened its doors to the internet with an apparently benevolent mission: to empower content creators without traditional channels to reach a young audience in the digital world.
It wasn’t always the preferred channel for those who create adult photos and videos, but the permissiveness regarding explicit content quickly established it as a favorite site for both “professional” and amateur porn actors. Also, with remarkable speed, organized crime groups from around the world saw opportunities to establish their human exploitation and money laundering operations there.
Nine years after OnlyFans’ debut, it’s easy to find disturbing stories online: models—both men and women—sexually exploited under the guise of financial gain, illicit content involving minors, fake profiles, and access to video libraries of real rapes with recurring credit card charges.
OnlyFans, the platform that promised freedom and ended up under the shadow of organised crime.
Young people kidnapped and held in apartments shared with other victims, their earnings ending up in the hands of clandestine groups. There are even cases of content creators trafficked from Moscow to Dubai. The list goes on.
In the United States, the State Department estimates that there are approximately 27.6 million victims of human trafficking worldwide. And with a global population exceeding 8 billion, people in modern slavery represent 0.345%. After the pandemic, nearly half of the world’s victims are trafficked online, in the world of OnlyFans.
Another disturbing statistic: The Polaris Project, which collects data on human trafficking survivors, indicated that 26% reported being exploited on their own social media accounts.
An estimated 14,214 victims are on the platform.
“Given that the platform is known for its sexual content, OnlyFans becomes another tool for human trafficking. In 2023, OnlyFans had 4.12 million creators and 305 million users. If we apply the aforementioned 0.345% to those creators, this suggests that there are approximately 14,214 victims of human trafficking on the platform,” states the global consulting firm Ankura.
Identifying these victims is a major challenge: content creators often don’t use their real names on their profiles, much less the criminals and their victims. And when the finances of individuals abducted are controlled by others, their accounts are usually located in countries where bank secrecy is difficult to break, even for authorities. However, there are clues that indicate that the mafia’s dark hand may be behind an Onlyfans account.
OnlyFans promised independence and security for its creators, but ended up being fertile ground for trafficking and money laundering.
Independent content creators can take photos in their own homes or outdoors, such as in luxury hotels, on beaches, or on boats. In contrast, victims of sexual exploitation create content in motels or apartments that appear to house multiple people, indicating that they don’t live in their own homes or have freedom of movement.
“Another constant element is the introduction or description. Each creator provides a brief description of the type of content they offer on their page. Pay attention to descriptions that offer in-person encounters, in-person sexual services, content with multiple partners, or that redirect to another site for more services. This may indicate that the OnlyFans profile wasn’t actually created to generate views, but rather as an advertisement for sexual exploitation.
“Speaking of advertisements, look for descriptions that use traditional advertising techniques, such as the excessive use of emojis (mainly sexual ones) and a large number of services with virtually no limits,” recommends the firm Ankura. Following that advice, we should look at the profile of ‘La Barbie Regia’: nine emojis in her X description alone, seven on Instagram, and a contact number that is now impossible to determine if she answered it exclusively or if it was managed by someone else. Her last message on X is another red flag: was she trying to fill a gap in her schedule, or was a third party hoping to profit from her online popularity?
When newspapers removed classified ads
At 15, Mixi’s life wasn’t one truth, but many versions. Sometimes, she posed as Paloma, an Argentinian exchange student in Mexico. Other times, she was called Rachel and was a Latina-American teenager deported to what was then the Federal District with her family. She also went by Karen or Sofía. She feigned a Spanish or Colombian accent. It all depended on what the man who wanted to pay to abuse her was looking for.
Since adolescence, she had learned to have many personalities to always please those exploitative clients looking for minors. They did so with the eyes of expert rapists, deciphering the key words that Mixi’s stepsister planted in the classified ads in the newspapers: “schoolgirl,” “young woman,” “student,” “visiting foreigner,” or “Lolita” meant that the “massage,” “companionship,” or “fun” was sex with someone who was underage and who was doing it against her will.
Advertisements for “massages” or “escorts” concealed stories like that of Mixi, a victim of trafficking since her teenage years.
“If they wanted me to be American, I was. If they wanted me to be 13, I was. If they wanted a Colombian girl, I had that too. My family taught me all of that.” “It was filled with the lives of so many women who didn’t exist, but at the same time, I felt empty,” Mixi said over coffee a few months ago for the podcast ‘Esquina Balderas.’ After nearly a year of being sexually exploited by her own family, her life took a turn in the winter of 2009 when a waiter at a Mexico City hotel saw her wandering the hallways, her eyes swollen from crying. The teenager confided in him that she had been kidnapped and that an exploitative client had beaten her for refusing to use a condom.
Iván hid her in an empty room, gave her his sweatshirt to hide from the cameras, and paid for a taxi so they could both escape the building, which had become a dungeon.
After hours of wandering the city, Mixi and Iván finally stopped at what was then the Attorney General’s Office of the Federal District, where they arranged for her transfer to the Camino a Casa shelter, where her recovery began.
In Mexico, four out of ten victims of sex trafficking are adolescents.
Her first act of survival was to ask the shelter’s founders to share her story nationwide: Mexico needed to know that alongside ads for used cars and jobs were paid advertisements from sex trafficking rings promoting their victims.
Thanks to her courage, in 2011 two major national newspapers eliminated the classified ads, a business that earned each of them some 20 million pesos a month, according to activist Rosi Orozco’s calculations. Other newspapers and magazines followed suit until the section was eliminated from the media altogether.
The measure generated mixed opinions: some felt it successfully shut down a channel used by organized crime to recruit and sell its victims, while others criticized it for blocking a way for sex workers to find clients without having to go to the streets, where they were at the mercy of traffickers and corrupt police officers.
Then the mafias began to take over the new virtual spaces.
Years passed before the internet solidified as a source of hope for sex workers: online, they thought, they could own their own virtual space without having to pay a pimp or madam any cut, only to the platform for their photos and profiles, just like paying for website hosting.
The first sites specializing in “dating” appeared, but they were quickly co-opted by organized crime, as happened with Match.com and ZonaDivas.com; social networks like Facebook and Instagram consolidated their power and were later sued for allowing paid encounters between minors and adults. The same happened with Tinder, Snapchat, and more. Sooner or later, every virtual space was taken over by mafias dedicated to prostitution and the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents.
The website advertised more than 500 women for sexual exploitation.
ZonaDivas.com was one of the most widely used websites by trafficking networks in Mexico before it was shut down in 2018.
Until a new lifeline emerged for independent sex work in London, UK: OnlyFans, the tool marketed as ideal for content creators to monetize their work through their followers. No intermediaries, no pimps. Just direct contact between digital creators and their fans.
The idea of no physical contact and digital payments seemed to finally solve the problem of organized crime infiltrating the sex market.
Only a few years were enough to confirm that, like dampness in a hotel room, organized crime advances through the smallest cracks and in the dark.
OnlyFans Lawsuits Around the World
In Romania, boxer Andrew Tate still faces charges in his country for rape and human trafficking for sexual exploitation, related to a network that allegedly forced women to create pornographic content for OnlyFans.
In Spain, British model Clara Wilson has been imprisoned since October, and will remain so for three more years, after admitting that she tried to bring Thai drugs into Barcelona for a criminal group that contacted her through her adult profile.
Andrew Tate, accused in Romania of rape and human trafficking, is alleged to have forced women to produce pornography for OnlyFans.
In the United Kingdom, since 2018, there have been allegations against a digital platform involving minors who, posing as adults over 21, sold pornography featuring teenagers. Similar allegations have surfaced in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, where the main suspicions of child sexual exploitation point to organized crime groups also involved in black markets such as arms and narcotics trafficking.
In Florida, United States, federal prosecutor Gregory W. Kehoe announced this year a formal indictment against content creator Kylie Leia Perez, also known as ‘Natalie Monroe,’ for tax evasion, which carries a maximum sentence of seven years in federal prison. She is accused of being part of a fraud ring.
“OnlyFans mimics a pyramid structure, where creators have incentives to recruit other creators, since they earn up to 5% of the new creator’s earnings. This means that OnlyFans creators have a vested interest in making life seem more glamorous than it actually is and in flooding social media with these messages,” asserts the Criminal Intelligence Initiative Against Human Trafficking.
In Ecuador, model and influencer Derly Figueroa was shot and killed on July 12, 2022, in Babahoyo, Los Ríos province. Two hitmen on a motorcycle intercepted her while she was talking with friends and murdered her in front of her daughter. That same year, she had survived an attack that allegedly originated on OnlyFans and was related to the extortion of content creators.
In Australia, a coalition of experts and academics from the University of New South Wales have publicly expressed concern that clandestine groups are using OnlyFans to launder illicit funds.
Sinaloa Cartel’s Dirty Money on OnlyFans
In Mexico, during the tenure of Pablo Gómez, a member of the Morena party, as head of the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Finance, 62 profiles of “narco-influencers” were identified. These profiles were allegedly artificially inflated with dirty money from factions of the Sinaloa Cartel to obtain laundered funds from social media platforms. This simple money laundering scheme was reportedly used by at least three OnlyFans content creators.
Also, since September, the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office has been investigating OnlyFans’ role in the murder of Colombian musicians B-King and DJ Regio Clown. A model, Angelica Yetsey Torrini Leon, was identified as an accomplice of the hitmen.
Angie Miller and B-King were murdered in Mexico City; the case points to links with OnlyFans.
While authorities in Mexico and around the world are figuring out how to catch organized crime in the world of online subscriptions, a new type of mobster is emerging: the “e-pimp” or “digital pimp,” that is, employees of “full-service agencies” who charge OnlyFans content creators—sometimes real women and sometimes profiles deceptively created with Artificial Intelligence—a fee to promote them.
They do the same thing as a street trafficker, but online: they promote services, collect payment upfront, take a cut, and claim to provide security. They are usually older men working from their homes, glued to a computer, posing as young and beautiful women selling erotic content. And if they find someone willing to pay for something more, like a video of a minor or a rape, they will simply raise the price and make it happen. In the world of online organized crime, the fan is always right.
Source: Milenio, Cartel Insider, Cartel Insider
The post The OnlyFans Mirage: Organised Crime Corrupts the Adult Platform appeared first on Cartel Insider.
