Consent violated: how creators pay the price for stolen OnlyFans content
- Written by Mayya Chernobylskaya, Kristina Böhmer, Polina Bachlakova, Apolena Rychlíková
- Edited by Ankita Anand
- Illustration by Marie Schwab
Up against a platform and police who seem to view abuse as inevitable, OnlyFans creators are fighting back against online harassers who gamify stealing and distributing their copyrighted material.
Chupz* stands out from the crowd. Her tattoos wind their way across her body, over her ears, and onto her forehead. On Instagram, the Frankfurt-based tattoo artist shows her 70,000 followers how her needle makes bears roar, faces come to life and aliens invade forearms. When she’s not tattooing, Chupz paints on canvas, sprays pink graffiti on walls or stands in front of a camera — but for a completely different reason.
Chupz creates explicit content on OnlyFans, where her photos and videos have been ‘liked’ by 15,000 people so far. A subscription-based platform, OnlyFans lets creators charge their ‘fans’ for their content; they choose who sees their photos and videos, and for what price. In return, the platform takes a 20 percent cut of the profits.
OnlyFans hosts a wide variety of content, from workout videos to cooking tutorials — but its steamy stuff is key to its success. It boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many sex workers had to migrate online because they couldn’t meet their clients in person. The boom continues: in 2023, OnlyFans earned $1.3 billion.
OnlyFans says that its creators “monetise their content safely, securely and on their own terms”. But for Chupz, that statement doesn’t ring entirely true.
Chupz is one of the thousands of women on OnlyFans whose content is stolen, shared and resold on a daily basis by perpetrators who call themselves content ‘leakers’.
Chupz is one of the thousands of women on OnlyFans whose content is stolen, shared and resold on a daily basis by perpetrators who call themselves content ‘leakers’. The photos and videos they sell to specific people routinely pop up on niche forums, in Telegram groups with thousands of members and on actively-used Discord servers — all without their consent.
But this isn’t just a violation of Chupz’s copyright.
In fact, Chupz is being subjected to image-based sexual abuse: a term referring to non-consensually creating or sharing intimate or sexual images of a person (or threatening to share them).
Patchwork protection
“An OnlyFans creator is entitled to the same protection as someone whose boyfriend or girlfriend has passed on their nudes to somebody else,” says Miriam Michaelsen, a Danish lawyer and expert in digital violence and harassment whose clients include OnlyFans creators. “As soon as someone shares private photos of you to a broader group, which you didn’t consent to, it goes against the Danish Criminal Act.”
In Denmark, image-based sexual abuse has been a criminal offence since 2018. But this is not the case in many other countries. In Germany, for example, adults are not yet fully protected from image-based sexual abuse. There is no specific law that comprehensively addresses this issue; instead, various laws cover only certain aspects of individual cases. But last year, the EU passed a directive criminalising image-based sexual abuse across the bloc. This means that every EU country needs to do the same within its borders (although so far, only Romania has begun the process).
Whereas accurate numbers are hard to come by, for this investigation, we spoke with 32 content creators across Europe; some consider themselves sex workers, while others see themselves as content creators or models. 23 of them have had their images and videos stolen and shared without their consent. Moreover, Jonathan Smyth, the chief technology officer of Ceartas DMCA — a company that specialises in taking down stolen content on behalf of its creators — estimates that 50 to 70 percent of paid OnlyFans content is getting stolen and spread without permission. There are more than 4 million creators on the platform.
In 2024, the EU parliament passed Directive 2024/1385 aimed at combatting violence against women and domestic violence, including provisions criminalizing stalking, child marriage, and retaliation against victims. The directive also addresses internet-based offenses, such as online stalking and image-based harassment.
In Article 5, the directive requires EU states to criminalize:
“making accessible to the public, by means of information and communication technologies (‘ICT’), images, videos or similar material depicting sexually explicit activities or the intimate parts of a person, without that person’s consent, where such conduct is likely to cause serious harm to that person.” |
… as well as threats to do so for coercion.
End Cyber Abuse, a group of lawyers and activists, have compiled a list of country factsheets about laws (and gaps in the law) on image-based sexual abuse in countries like Japan, USA, and India.
For Chupz, the abuse started within her first steps on OnlyFans. Later, she discovered that, despite not having a large following on the platform in her first weeks as a content creator, her photos had already been stolen and widely shared on public forums such as Reddit — freely accessible to people who hadn’t paid for them. She also found a thread on a German-language site called Celebforum: a platform notorious for hosting non-consensually obtained images and videos, primarily targeting women internet personalities. Much of the abusive content on Celebforum is stolen from OnlyFans, making it one of the forum’s most popular and harmful categories.
Celebforum is more than just a place to share stolen photos. Here, users also discuss creators, gossiping about their relationships and judging their personalities as ‘cool’ or ‘boring’. Pricing also sparks debate, with comments such as “Who gave her the confidence to charge €25?” While the intensity of these discussions varies, the forum clearly shows a feverish focus on individual creators — their personas, exclusive content and, at times, private lives.
Celebforum had over 7 million visits in April 2025, according to website data aggregator Siteweb. When Chupz found out that her explicit videos were shared on such a popular website, her coping mechanism was to grin and bear it. “As soon as you let it get to you, you’ve lost the game,” she says. She kept up this attitude even when she was stalked. “I ordered a TV and the delivery guy said, ‘Oh, you’re Chupz. So this is where you live. This is your flat.’ Days later, I kept seeing him hanging around outside my house.”
As if the stalking wasn’t enough, Chupz was presumably doxxed. Someone outed her neighbourhood on Celebforum. Chupz made Celebforum delete the thread, but the situation took a turn offline for the worse shortly after: while she was away, strangers showed up at her apartment, threw objects at her door and tried to pry open her mailbox. She suspects that they found her address by combing through the information published about her on Celebforum, analysing her YouTube videos, pausing on shots of her balcony — and figuring out her location based on the background.
Worst of all, there were signs of a break-in attempt on her door. The perpetrators tried to get into her apartment while her dog was home. “I was furious thinking about how scared she must have been,” she says. The only small consolation? “At least they were too stupid to get inside,” Chupz chuckles.
Gamifying sexual abuse
“I think it’s about power,” Chupz states, reflecting on the ‘leakers’’ motives. She says many of her subscribers complain that she charges for her work in the first place, get even more frustrated when she ups the prices for more exclusive content — and try to get back at her by ‘leaking’ her photos and videos.
During this investigation, Unbias the News monitored dozens of groups full of thousands of people devoted to sharing OnlyFans ‘leaks’. We conclude that if you want to steal photos and videos from OnlyFans, you don’t have to work very hard. Third-party apps can help you get past the paywall; if those get shut down, you can learn a few lines of code to swipe a creator’s entire catalogue by watching a ‘how-to’ tutorial on YouTube or on a ‘leaks’ forum.
So if people want to ‘get back’ at creators like Chupz, it’s relatively easy to leak their content. Especially when they’re incentivised to do so by the communities and platforms they are part of.
"So much of the leaked content comes from personal vendettas. These people follow the model, don’t get the attention they want, steal the content aggressively — and even keep sharing it after the model is inactive."
Whether eagerly requesting leaks or sharing download links to fresh batches of stolen nudes, Celebforum members rally around the motto “sharing is caring”. Many users display this phrase — or variations of it — in their post signatures. Others sprinkle similar wording throughout comments or use terms like “man of honour” to praise those who contribute with stolen content. Plus, the platform structure itself encourages users to keep sharing stolen content and commenting: the more you do that, the more points you get — which unlock ‘VIP’ access to even more explicit material.
Unbias the News asked several ‘leakers’ why they do what they do.
“Because it’s interesting to see how famous people present themselves. I don’t get sexual pleasure out of it,” said Palle, a 21-year-old user on a website that hosts both consensual pornography and stolen content from OnlyFans.
“I think they’re just sellout whores,” said a man nicknamed Bytes, who owns a Discord server where around 8,000 people shared image-based sexual abuse.
Dilara Bilgisel is a sales manager at Rulta, an Estonian ‘leaks’ takedown agency that helps OnlyFans creators get their stolen content removed from search results. “Misogyny is naturally a big part of this,” she says. “So much of the leaked content comes from personal vendettas. These people follow the model, don’t get the attention they want, steal the content aggressively — and even keep sharing it after the model is inactive.”
Jana’s story
"I have seen quite a few situations where victims — my clients — have filed a case with the police, and they closed it because the material comes from OnlyFans."
Before anxiety trapped her in her own home, *Jana, a former beauty salon owner from a quiet Slovak town, found new purpose on OnlyFans. She quit the salon and OnlyFans became her job — a space where she felt free and safe.
That sense of security collapsed when her intimate content, made for paying subscribers, was stolen and shared in Telegram groups. “When I found out, I almost threw up,” she recalls. The violation filled her everyday with anxiety. “Sometimes people look at me outside and I wonder if they’ve seen me somewhere,” Jana confides. Her fear peaked when a neighbour — someone she felt safe with because he grew up with her partner — wrote to say he masturbated to her photos on Twitter. He wouldn’t stop writing to her. “At one point, I was afraid to leave the house,” she says.
Jana pored over the public Telegram groups full of her leaks. One day, a username sharing her nude photos caught her eye. She’d seen it before — from one of her subscribers on OnlyFans. Jana sent him a private message on Telegram, asking him to take her leaks down. But instead of doing that, he screenshotted their conversation and published it in the Telegram group. Other members told him he should teach “problem girls” like Jana a lesson by stealing all of her content.
On Telegram, abusive groups like the one that Jana found are common. There are groups for men who dox women. Groups for non-consensual intimate image violence. Groups for AI-generated child sex abuse material. Money seems to be a motivating factor, too: we identified Telegram channels (but also Discord servers and other forums) where ‘leakers’ sell stolen OnlyFans content — typically in bundles featuring one or multiple creators.
Part of the issue is that anonymous account creation via virtual phone numbers enables abuse to proliferate without consequence. The other is Telegram itself: despite publicly stating its commitment to fighting “bad actors”, Telegram has refused to join international programmes aimed at detecting child sexual abuse material and has long faced criticism for its poor content moderation.
At the same time, Telegram isn’t classified as a “Very Large Platform” under the EU’s main law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which aims to hold social media platforms accountable within the bloc. As a result, it’s not legally obliged to strictly moderate what happens on its platform. “Telegram is a problem child in that sense,” says Ask Hesby Holm, Director of a Danish NGO called Digital Ansvar, which roughly translates to ‘Digital Accountability’. “The EU created some boxes to put all the internet actors into, but Telegram doesn’t fit.”
Jana reported specific cases of image-based sexual abuse to Telegram’s support number. The platform didn’t respond. If Telegram wouldn’t help her, thought Jana, perhaps the police could. She tried to file a sexual abuse case against one of the ‘leakers’. Instead of helping her, she says that the police actively “did everything they could to avoid having to accept” her report, claiming they wouldn’t find the perpetrator anyway. Jana changed tactics: she went to a different station and this time, she tried to report the theft as copyright violation, which is punishable by 1-5 years in prison. But the officer dismissed her claim as a minor misdemeanour against civil coexistence — a categorisation completely unrelated to copyright.
Matúš Kanis is a lawyer known for representing image-based sexual abuse victims in Slovakia and dealing with digital crimes in general. He calls this incorrect classification “nonsense”. He claims that the police, understaffed and unwilling, simply “do not want” to prosecute such cases, even though the perpetrators can be traced through payment systems.
This lax approach is not limited to Slovakia. “I have seen quite a few situations where victims — my clients — have filed a case with the police, and they closed it because the material comes from OnlyFans,” said Michaelsen, the Danish lawyer.
OnlyFans is increasingly facing legal heat: for example, the English government recently fined them £1 million for failing to verify ages properly. But so far, no one has successfully taken OnlyFans to court over the content theft plaguing its platform. Instead, most of the creators Unbias the News spoke with for this investigation are like Jana: battling the leakers alone. But not all.
Teaming up against the leakers
“The attack from the leakers stopped me in my tracks,” says Linda, a Czech OnlyFans creator. “I didn’t publish anything for maybe half a year. I didn’t trust my clients and didn’t want to share my intimacy. It was a very fragile time.”
According to photographs and emails obtained by Unbias the News, in 2020, several young men coordinated the theft of private content from Czech creators on platforms like OnlyFans and Patreon. Hundreds of their photos and videos were widely circulated across platforms such as Discord, Telegram and X (formerly Twitter), where leakers often accompanied the posts with hateful and demeaning commentary. “The girls talked a lot about the financial consequences of leaking, but I was more upset from a moral standpoint and about the way the leakers talked about us. They wrote that it’s like going to the store, buying two loaves of bread, and giving one to a friend,” says Lizzie, another model targeted by the leakers.
Some models asked the ‘leakers’ to remove their content, but had no success.
In response, five creators decided to come together and began collecting evidence. They collected samples of stolen material, screenshots of Discord discussions and the main ‘leakers’’ names. Then, they decided to approach the police. “But we wanted to maintain our anonymity so that we wouldn’t be an easy target,” explains Linda.
So they asked their photographer, Petr, whose work had also been stolen and redistributed without permission, to file a criminal complaint on their behalf.
“I went to the police and said, ‘My content was stolen and this goes against copyright law,” says the photographer. He also claimed that he’d lost money. “They listened to me, took notes… and nothing else happened. The police didn’t contact me at all,” says the photographer.
Given the time that has elapsed since the case, we have been unable to verify why the concrete police station did not contact Petr after he filed the complaint. But Ondřej Moravčík, head of the Czech police’s press department, says that Petr’s case should have been taken on. “If a person contacts us and proves that their rights have been violated and damage has been caused, there are grounds for initiating criminal proceedings. The perpetrator is the person who makes the content available without the owner’s consent,” he says. “However, I am not aware of any cases from OnlyFans that have been reported to us.”
Is OnlyFans doing enough?
OnlyFans says that it strives to be “the safest online platform”. Its terms prohibit sharing creators’ content without consent, and the platform has an anti-screenshot technology in place. OnlyFans also sends around 1,000 monthly copyright takedown requests on behalf of creators, according to its own accountability reports.
At the same time, its terms state that OnlyFans bears no responsibility for “damages or losses”. But given the long-standing pervasiveness of image-based sexual abuse on OnlyFans, a growing chorus of voices is asking two questions: could the platform be doing more to combat it? And if yes, why isn’t it?
One of those voices is Madelaine Thomas: a sex worker, OnlyFans creator and tech entrepreneur. Tired of constant abuse from ‘leakers’ and seeing the same happen to her peers, Thomas teamed up with an engineer and founded her own anti-theft software, ImageAngel. It works by embedding a unique, digital fingerprint into every photo you send someone — so if it’s ‘leaked’, you can tell who shared it. “I created Image Angel to act as a deterrent, so that when they look at content they think ‘beautiful, I love this — but I’m not going to take it outside of here,'” Thomas explains.
"I created Image Angel to act as a deterrent, so that when they look at content they think 'beautiful, I love this — but I'm not going to take it outside of here."
To date, several platforms, use ImageAngel. But OnlyFans isn’t an ImageAngel customer — even though Thomas personally knows some of its managers. “I blame our culture for being so flippant with people’s privacy — but I blame OnlyFans for letting it happen,” she tensely says. “I don’t know why they aren’t doing more, considering the amount of revenue they generate.”
Unbias the News wrote to OnlyFans’ support team for comment. “At OnlyFans, we take piracy very seriously and are constantly exploring new technologies,” they replied, citing the anti-screenshot technology they have in place. We did not receive any answers to our further questions regarding specific measures taken by the platform to protect female creators.
Women suffer as ‘leakers’ thrive
Image-based sexual abuse is a rising issue across the EU, but OnlyFans creators are often excluded from justice. While lawmakers and platforms like OnlyFans claim to take piracy seriously, enforcement often stops at the platform’s borders. On the other side, its creators are often left to bear the consequences when the pirates succeed.
For Chupz, the constant, non-consensual exposure of her body has blurred the line between OnlyFans being a choice and a life sentence. “To some extent, the leaks took away my possibility of ever walking away,” she explains. For Jana, the fight has become a relentless and emotionally draining ordeal. She describes “fits” of despair and says that the constant violation of her rights makes her feel “disgraced and humiliated”.
Jana’s fight for justice is not only about her stolen photos: it’s about battling a system that accepts sex workers’ image-based sexual abuse as a normal side effect of the internet instead of the crime it is, at least in the EU. Meanwhile, for the ‘leakers’, a lack of consent is rarely something to get off on. Instead, it’s fuel for a subculture that gamifies image-based sexual abuse, and turns it into social and financial capital.
*Chupz and Jana agreed to speak on the condition that Unbias the News would use aliases.
Vânia Maia contributed to the reporting in this story.
This investigation was supported by Journalismfund Europe.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified clients of the Image Angel software. The article has been updated to remove this error.
About the authors
cross-border investigations as well as local news in Germany’s Hessen
region. She holds a Master’s degree in History and is passionate about
collaborative journalism that brings diverse voices together.
whose reporting primarily focuses on feminist issues. Her work appears
in Al Jazeera, the BBC, Foreign Policy, The Fuller Project, openDemocracy, taz and more. She is a Fellow of 2024’s European Collaborative Journalism Programme, and is a Journalismfund and IJ4EU grant recipient. Polina is also a board member at sex-positive association Bedside Productions.
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