The whistleblower, a senior compliance expert in the credit card and banking industries, said the two giant card companies knew their networks were being used to pay for illegal content on the porn-driven site since at least 2021, and accused them of “turning a blind eye to flows of illicit revenue.”
The complaint said that the whistleblower and other anti-trafficking experts, including U.S. federal agents, alerted Visa and Mastercard to unlawful content on OnlyFans in a series of calls in 2021 and 2022. The federal agents corroborated the presence of child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans, the complaint said.
On OnlyFans, Visa and Mastercard process payments between content creators and their customers. When the content is child sexual abuse material, the card companies are “directly handling the proceeds of these illicit transactions,“ said the complaint.
Reuters reviewed an email confirming FinCEN had received the complaint. In response to questions, the agency said it doesn’t confirm or deny the existence of whistleblower complaints. The Justice and Homeland Security departments declined to comment.
In an interview, the whistleblower said the agencies never contacted him to discuss his complaint. The card companies had “the power to turn off the switch” to stop illicit material from being monetized, he added.
A Visa spokesperson said financial institutions and merchants that don’t comply with Visa’s “robust compliance requirements” will be terminated from its network. The company uses “best-in-class controls to deter, detect and remediate illegal activity,“ the spokesperson said.
“No evidence of current illegal activity has been provided to us,“ despite the whistleblower’s claim, the spokesperson said.
Since the whistleblower complaint was filed, Reuters uncovered more allegations of child sexual abuse and sex trafficking on OnlyFans, a porn-driven site that generates money through subscriptions and pay-per-view content.
The Mastercard spokesperson called Reuters’ findings on child sexual abuse on OnlyFans “alarming” but said law enforcement or certain child-protection groups would need to provide evidence of illegal activity for the company to act or investigate. Visa didn’t comment on whether the company was investigating Reuters’ findings.
OnlyFans is one of the world’s fastest-growing and most lucrative creator platforms. It relies heavily on payment cards to process subscriptions, tips and other transactions between its more than 300 million users and its four million content creators. Its surging profits have made it a leader in the creator economy. In September, OnlyFans reported $6.6 billion in gross payments to creators, up 20% from the year before. It made $1.3 billion in revenue.
Many porn websites are free and make money mostly from advertising. OnlyFans, by contrast, takes a 20% cut of the income its creators earn from selling content to subscribers, who must enter their card details to pay for it.
American Express can’t be used on OnlyFans under a longstanding global policy that prohibits its cards from being used for online adult content, as pokesperson said. Payment services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay also have similar policies against online porn transactions.
A spokesperson for Discover declined to comment.
In May 2021, the BBC detailed several cases of explicit videos of underage teens on OnlyFans. Three months later, 102 members of Congress called for a Justice Department investigation into alleged child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans. The department declined to comment on the status of that request.
The site was hosting child sexual abuse material, the experts told the Mastercard executives. And one expert – a U.S. federal agent – said he could prove it. During the call, said the attendee, the agent accessed an OnlyFans account with sexually explicit images of what he said was a young girl. The agent described the images to others on the call but didn’t share them, which would have been illegal.
“Each of them affirmed that status,“ he said, without identifying the institutions.
The indicators included keywords and images found by searching the publicly available profiles of OnlyFans creators, said the ATII report. With these methods, researchers uncovered a “tremendous amount of troubling material” on the platform, it said. The whistleblower said he reviewed the report, which notes the anti-money laundering duties of financial institutions, before publication to ensure it reflected industry practice.
‘BUSINESS AS USUAL’
Mastercard introduced stricter rules aimed at “preventing illegal adult content on our network.” They were prompted by the ease with which people could now upload content to the internet, said John Verdeschi, a senior vice president, in a statement at the time.
In an interview in August that year with the Financial Times, OnlyFans founder and then-CEO Tim Stokely said his platform was “already fully compliant” with the Mastercard requirements.
The whistleblower complaint said the card companies appeared to be shifting the blame for processing payments related to child sexual abuse material onto banks “while carrying on with business as usual.” Visa and Mastercard did not comment on that assertion.
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