Woman who works as an OnlyFans ‘chatter’ reveals how her surprising role actually works as most people don’t even realise her job exists
Many people will log on to the notoriously elusive world of OnlyFans in the hopes of chatting to a top adult creator. They might dip further into their pockets and splurge on custom explicit images or videos, or just simply engage in a ‘sexting’ session.
But that popular OnlyFans model they’ve been chatting to for weeks could well be a rotating team of workers, based anywhere in the world.
The often murky world of OnlyFans has ballooned to new heights in the years since the coronavirus pandemic, brimming with success stories of creators earning in the millions from the pay-for-content site, which is often hailed as the modern-day answer to sex work.
But there’s an underbelly forming beneath the rapidly-growing platform that could end up testing the limits of fantasy and deception.
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Enter: OnlyFans' 'chatters', employed by the site's top creators to 'consensually catfish' them, chat to subscribers and entice them to splash out on extra explicit content.
Tyla spoke to Kyra*, a British woman currently employed as a 'chatter' by a top-earning female OnlyFans model with 'hundreds of thousands of subscribers' in the UK.
The model in question has 'several' people working for her, the majority of whom are actually men, and it's a '24/7' schedule to keep all the plates spinning behind the scenes.
"They basically have somebody online 24/7, literally every day of the year. 24 hours a day, there is somebody there for people to talk to and respond," Kyra tells us.
Kyra took the job after she saw the 'admin assistant' role advertised on the creator's social media, but other people find their way in through adverts in 'digital nomad' group chats, she says.
But while the role itself is gaining traction within the often mysterious sector of the adult industry, that doesn't mean there's not a hiring process like any other job.
"On the hiring front of it, they kind of gauge from you whether you're able to sext in a way that is in line with them. So you kind of go through a bit of a screening process to check that your English is good enough, that you're kind of capable enough of embodying her while you work.
"I think the questions they would ask for the interview are just like, 'on average, how often are you sexting people?', 'how much experience do you have with this kind of thing?' and being a 21st-century young person, quite a lot of us have quite a bit of experience in that area. So, yeah, I guess it was just bigging up your confidence with it.
"And then it was just a trial shift, and they talk you through it and how to use the platform, how to respond. They'll have their regulars [regular clients], and with the regulars, you need to be a bit more on the ball with how you sound and which emojis you use and that kind of thing. To keep the quality and the tone of voice, they talk about the importance of that quite often."
When she's on shift, it's Kyra's job to log on and respond to all the messages that are coming in from her boss' subscribers, which on a 'busy' shift can look like talking to 'hundreds of men over the course of a few hours'.
She's also hoping that some of those people will want to go beyond their basic subscription fee and splurge on additional pictures and videos, which she will also earn a cut from.
"It’s a commission-based role that, on a bad day, would be only a few pounds an hour, but on a good day could be quite profitable," she tells us.
Kyra has a whole bank of videos and images at her disposal that the OnlyFans model has pre-recorded for her. And it's these that she sends to subscribers - for a higher fee, of course.
Kyra explained: "So they'll have a bank of content - some are the videos that they offer. They'll have cover pages for each of the videos. Like, this is the ‘boy girl tape’ that involves this, and it's kind of advertised, and they're advertising it as content, but then there's the sexting content.
"When they're [the customers] paying, they'll pay a lot of money to have a sexting session, but then get someone like me behind the screen sending them pre recorded videos and scripted sexting."
While a lot of her 'sexting sessions' will involve scripted content, Kyra does have to improvise fairly often depending on what's thrown her way. But over her time in the role, she's found her groove and says it's just a case of 'stroking their ego'.
"There's certain areas where it just works to copy and paste across some of the scripted stuff. So we're given the individual power to do with it how we will."
That being said, Kyra admits it can feel quite 'odd' to have to 'be somebody else', and that having to pour over so many of the chats to get used to the tone of voice she needs to convey can be quite a lot.
But despite having 'good boundaries' with the job, there is one aspect that can be upsetting.
"Some people really will start to feel very, very connected to the model," Kyra explained. "They will fall in love with them, basically. It's quite sad. I feel sad. Those are probably the messages that sort of upset me the most is when you've got somebody being like, ‘you're the only person that gets me’. ‘You're the only person that I feel like I can open up to’, all of this kind of stuff.
"And you're like, you're talking to an OnlyFans pornstar, essentially, and you are in love with her, and that makes me sad. You have to be really gentle with the way that you're responding with them, but at the same time, I just want to be like, 'get out in the world and go meet some real people'.
"But some people, they don't have the capability of doing that, and then they're kind of sucked into this world where they're falling in love with somebody they have to pay for online.
"That's probably the hardest part of the role is knowing that they're not really talking to this person [the model]."
Some of the men Kyra speaks to will even send her poetry.
"Some of the messages are really, really long, I’ll be sent poetry or be sent all of this kind of nauseating stuff quite often, and I'm not gonna lie, sometimes I use Chat GPT when it’s busy and I can't be bothered to go through it all.
"But if I've got a bit more time because it's less busy then I'll put in a little bit more of a real human touch," she confessed.
Asked what a bad shift can look like, Kyra tells us it's mainly having to talk to 'd*ckheads' who are after free content and don't want to stump up the money.
"You're just sitting there like, 'It's OnlyFans, mate, this is how it works'," she joked.
Having to juggle so many conversations, it seems natural to assume that some subscribers may get suspicious of who they're really talking to. While Kyra she admits she has has a few near misses, it's not a problem - there's a backup plan in place.
"I have had a few people pull it up, but then there’s backups of voice notes and photographs and stuff that we can send to prove that it's her, basically."
But there's a potential problem brewing.
The world of OnlyFans chatters has ripped open an ethical minefield that's unfolding in real-time, seen most recently after two guys filed a class action lawsuit alleging they were tricked and were talking to 'impersonated' models. They claim OnlyFans and its parent companies did not meet the expectations of its users and that they were defrauded by the models.
M. Brunner and J. Fry, who filed the suit this month, claimed the OnlyFans creators they were shelling out for were using third-party agencies instead of speaking to them directly, and that if they'd have known they were speaking to 'chatters', they'd have never subscribed in the first place - or at least, not for the price they were paying.
The men did not provide proof they were talking to 'chatters' in the suit, which was filed against Fenix International Limited and Fenix Internet, LLC, OnlyFans' parent companies.
OnlyFans has not addressed the recent lawsuit, but a spokesperson told Cosmopolitan in an unrelated story last year: "Any third party that a creator elects to work with does not work on behalf of OnlyFans and is not affiliated with the company in any way.
“Creators may choose to work with a wide range of third parties, including photographers, videographers, talent managers and agencies, to curate and monetize their content.”
We posed this issue to Kyra, and when quizzed on how she feels about the ethics of her job, she told us: "This is why I have to be really good at switching off - because sometimes you are feeling a little bit guilty that they're not actually talking to the person that they think it is.
Kyra says she can feel a bit guilty about what she does (Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
"But, you know, it's all an illusion anyway. These people that think they're in love with this person - some people that I talk to fully think she's their girlfriend, and one of the questions at the end of the day is: is it the illusion that you're paying for? The illusion that you're speaking to this person that you idolise? Because if you were to put the messages that we were writing next to the messages that she [the model] was writing, they'd look exactly the same.
"At the end of the day, the content [pics and videos] they're receiving is real, and it is from that person. And they can pay a premium price to have a video call.
"Those options are still available. They just need to fork out a bit more money."
As far as the specific allegations laid out in the class action suit, Kyra admitted she 'wouldn't really know what to say or think about that'.
One thing she does know is that her unconventional job has enabled her to have 'way more respect for the genuine connections' in her life.
"It's given me more clarity, on when I'm seeking validation and when something's genuine in my own personal life. It's actually had way more of a positive effect on me than a negative effect doing this job," she says.
As more and more OnlyFans creators position their pages as fully-fledged business models, it begs the question of whether expanding out into a team of employees is just the name of the game when you're flooded with messages you can't keep up with, or whether the world of 'chatters' crosses the line into posing serious ethical dilemmas that could prove tricky to untangle.
Tyla has contacted OnlyFans for comment.
*Names have been changed to protect identities
Topics: OnlyFans, UK News, World News, Life, Real Life
Chloe Jackson