Originally published at: Woman uncovers husband's $135k OnlyFans addiction, bankrupting the family - Boing Boing
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The only way a site sets up controls* is if a state demands it as a condition of operating in the jurisdiction. Although I doubt this is far from the only mope who dropped six figures on fake internet “girlfriends” and destroyed his finances and family, I don’t see anywhere in the U.S. doing to OnlyFans what they did with on-line gambling. Maybe an EU country like the Netherlands, where sex work is de-criminalised and regulated, might do it if enough of its citizens ruin their lives via OnlyFans.
[* And to be clear, those controls are usually desultory efforts that rely on an addict making a rational decision.]
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What did they do with online gambling?
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States that allow on-line gambling generally insist that sites operating in their jurisdictions have “responsible gambling” mechanisms for users to limit the amounts they gamble or time spent on the site as well as self-exclusion tools.* As I said, they’re far from perfect, but I doubt we’ll see anything at all required by a U.S. jurisdiction for OnlyFans.
[* the original requirement forcing the inclusion of controls may not have come from the U.S.]
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Woman uncovers husband’s $135k OnlyFans addiction, bankrupting the family
Um, the bankruptcy wasn’t a result of her uncovering the husband’s shenanigans, it was caused by said shenanigans. Kind of a misleading headline there.
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So now they can afford only fans?
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Online gambling has that kind of restriction in the UK. Adverts for gambling always tout their controls which allow you to limit your spend per bet, per session, and so on. I doubt it really works for addicts.
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It wasn’t really an only fans addiction. He made large payments to one woman because he was trying to have an affair with her.
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In the wife’s eyes, that gooner is a goner.
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How is this the “dark side” of anything except what creepy dudes do?
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He at least was more business conscious on these thing, for that money he got the real stuff not some video on a computer 
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Her husband is physically abusive, neglectful, and spends $135,000 on an affair with a woman he met through OnlyFans, and this is somehow OnlyFans’ fault? This is some disappointing moral panic journalism from Reuters. A sex work marketplace doesn’t turn people into assholes.
Here’s another bogus part of the story about the woman whose uncle becomes her biggest fan on OnlyFans and later reveals himself, “D.W.’s ordeal highlights a fundamental risk for OnlyFans creators: They often don’t know the true identity of even their most loyal subscribers.” What is the writer suggesting that OnlyFans ought to do, provide creators with dossiers on their fans? This isn’t an OnlyFans problem. This is a societal issue that has to do with the way we fail to provide children with effective sex, consent, and relationship education, and the ability to distinguish between social and parasocial relationships.
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An unregulated marketplace with no controls creates a playground for arseholes and criminals and fosters aspiring ones.
The writer is pointing out a risk inherent in this particular form of sex work. Not all risks have solutions. The best that could be done here would be to show the sex worker the subscriber’s location (maybe based on some combination of IP address and billing zip code) and perhaps give the content creator a way to block subscribers by city or state. A determined creep would circumvent that measure, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be useful.
This is all very true. However, most of the cases cited concern adults who were born before social media took root. And some of the cases (e.g. filmed animal abuse or sex in public places and identity theft) are outright illegal as well as being creepy.
While there are larger societal issues at play here, the problem with the specific platform (and others, sexually explicit or otherwise) is that it’s not acknowledging them at all, let alone trying to address them.
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I wouldn’t expect a gambling-style regulation of how fast and fun it is to spend money before you’ve noticed(as you noted it’s often pretty perfunctory even when mandated; and it disappears entirely once you work to not too closely resemble a traditional casino game or sportsbook arrangement; as anyone in mobile gaming cheerfully selling lootboxes to children or cultivating whales knows full well and will sometimes even be surprisingly candid about).
What does surprise me a bit is that there isn’t more fire being drawn by the other sort of bigger spenders: first Craigslist, then Backpage after Craigslist was forced out; learned the hard way that even attempts to cooperate with anti-trafficking activity will not keep you from drawing fire for association with prostitution; and both of those were before SAVE and FOSTA-SESTA specifically codified the general outlines of what those cases were built on.
The people who are just spending lots of money because Onlyfans manages to short circuit the reward pathways the same way video slots or gatcha games do might well be a category worth looking into; but consumer protection is not the hottest of topics; and such an inquiry would involve stepping on toes across a number of reasonably influential industries. Sure, let’s just tell the American Chamber of Commerce that it’s illegal to make spending money too attractive…
The ones spending more because prostitution is more expensive than pornography, though, seem like they would be of pretty straightforward interest to anyone either sincerely concerned about supply chain abuses or in need of a pretext to go after an otherwise legal porn operation.
Following up, the full four-part Reuters investigation.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/onlyfans-sex-legal-cases/
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/onlyfans-sex-children/
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/onlyfans-sex-chatters/
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/onlyfans-sex-cases-society/
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