No protection: Shady OnlyFans agencies put Filipino workers at risk

Second of two parts
Part 1 | Behind OnlyFans: Filipino workers edit, sell sex content for foreign models

Trigger warning: The following piece mentions sexual harassment.

A little more than a year into her job as a video and photo editor for an OnlyFans management agency, Anna had been content with her sizable salary and flexible work setup. That was until she started getting unsolicited messages from her team lead and co-workers — even if these had nothing to do with their jobs.

She was the only female and only Filipino in a team of six people, while the company she worked for was largely male-dominated. For her last eight months on the job, her male co-workers would send her rape jokes on the daily, insinuating that she only became an OnlyFans editor so she could learn how to become a model herself.

Her team would arrange meetings, only for them to instead corner her to ask for nudes, intimate videos, and make other sexually-charged comments.

“One rape joke was like: ‘If ever our boss would fly you out to come and visit the company, we would lock you up in the pantry room here and we would all take turns fucking you,’” she narrated to Rappler.

Months of relentless torment finally led Anna to resign from her job, but not before reporting to her boss everything that her co-workers said and did. Luckily, her boss was a “nice guy,” according to Anna, and he would later fire all the co-workers who harassed her months after she resigned. 

Her boss also offered to help her press charges, but she declined because she knew that she could not afford the legal fees. Instead, the company ended up compensating Anna with P100,000 on top of her final salary. 

Half a year after her resignation, a good chunk of that money is still safely stowed away as an emergency fund — something that she never had before taking the OnlyFans job. The extra cash takes some of the worry off her mind, especially since her current job as a remote social media manager pays less than her previous one.

That’s why, even after Anna’s horrendous experience, she has not closed her doors on applying for the same job again sometime in the future. The pay is just too good to pass up. She just hopes the employees in the next agency she applies for will not have the same tendencies — though she is aware that she will, once again, be going in blind.

Anna is far from being the only Filipino worker to face the same conundrum of being at the mercy of higher-ups and coworkers in an unregulated industry. 

For chatter Kara, the job opportunity that was supposed to enhance her financial standing instead trapped her in a low-paying, high-demand job that was only made even more restrictive by vague employment terms. 

After just a few days on the job, she found that her already scant $2 (P118) hourly rate was still subject to deductions if she did not meet an 80% productivity rate measured by a time-tracking software. And even after a few weeks into her job, she still wasn’t able to sell any explicit content as a chatter — rendering the promise of a 5% commission a waste.

Eventually, she decided to just leave. According to her, the mental toll that came with crafting seductive responses that were creative enough to deceive and hook clients was above her pay grade.

A troubled, exploitative industry

For many online workers like Anna and Kara, their experience with this kind of work varies wildly from agency to agency. Foreign media outlets reported that some workers found the job liberating and rewarding, while others felt trapped in toxic work conditions.

The difference lies in how their managers and co-workers treat them, which is common to any kind of job. But what regular workers have, that employees in OnlyFans agencies don’t, are regulations that prevent companies from taking things too far — along with a safe space to raise concerns when their boundaries are crossed.

Former staffers of top OnlyFans agency, Unruly Agency, also filed a total of nine lawsuits against their employer for all manner of abuses. These included unpaid wages, wrongful termination, emotional distress, discrimination, and unjust imprisonment. All these lawsuits were filed across a span of several years, from 2021 to 2024, with no reports yet of court decisions.

When justice is slow even with employers and employees living in the same country, what recourse do Filipino workers have when they live oceans away and have fewer resources?

The winning case of Joanna Pascua, a Filipino paralegal working remotely for an Australian company, who filed for an unfair dismissal case against her former employer sheds light on how to handle these cases. Despite Pascua’s company labeling her as a “contractor,” Australia’s Fair Work Act 2009 recognized her as an employee.
This case provides a powerful precedent for OnlyFans chatters and content editors who are often classified as “freelancers” or “independent contractors” by employers wanting to avoid basic liabilities. As a result, they fall outside the full scope of the Labor Code, and must rely solely on the terms written in their contract for protection.

In their situation, being recognized as an employee changes the relationship from a purely commercial one to a protected labor relationship.

While the Philippines does not have an exact equivalent of Australia’s FWA that helped Pascua win, local courts also use a set of criteria to look past contractual labels and focus on the actual reality of the work relationship.

Currently though, no publicly-reported legal complaint has been filed locally against OnlyFans or its related agencies.

But this doesn’t mean that the workers are not exposed to the potential unfair labor practices that come with these jobs. Testimonies online have already proven that some workers have not been paid, while others are as vulnerable to the power dynamics that the work culture has spawned.

The worry of being scammed by unscrupulous agencies is apparent in Facebook groups where Filipino chatters and virtual assistants are being hired. Many of the posts ask for a “legit check” or “LC” of agencies that they plan to apply for. There are even regularly updated lists of “scam” agencies that are said to bail on paying wages or commissions after an employee has already rendered a few weeks of work.

For workers who live from paycheck to paycheck, the blow inflicted by these so-called “scammers” can be devastating.

Lawyer Marvilie M. Serna put it bluntly when she told Rappler that working in this industry is “a trap.” The workers subject themselves to conditions with little to no legal recourse when their labor rights are violated.

“The crime must happen here in the Philippine jurisdiction for it to be punishable in the Philippines,” she said. Here, a violation of the Safe Spaces Act, which includes harassment, rape jokes or green jokes, and even unwanted comments on one’s appearance could be filed, she explained.

Men at the top

Complicating this issue even more is men dominating these OnlyFans agencies. Researcher Tim Squirrell from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a network of independent and non-profit organizations studying extremism, links the rise of these agencies to social media influencer Andrew Tate. His research formed the basis of reports published by Prism, a news site led by women of color featured on NiemanLab, and The Sun, one of the United Kingdom’s most popular news outlets.

According to these reports, Tate ran his own lucrative webcam modeling business using the same business model. He was later charged with human trafficking.

On YouTube, step-by-step guides to running these agencies are overwhelmingly narrated by men. Books, podcasts, and online courses frame the business as a low-risk and high-reward venture, very often glossing over who actually bears the emotional, reputational, and physical costs in the industry.

It’s an ironic development for a platform that originally empowered the majority of its female creators for monetized content creation on their own terms. In fact, the OnlyFans female user base accounted for 70% of the over four million creator accounts in 2025, according to the website of the Lonely Fans docuseries of filmmaker Rock Jacobs. 

This gendered dominance is not unique to the platform. As early as 2020, women already made up about 62% of online freelancers in the Philippines — the highest percentage globally at the time, according to the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS).

However, sociologist Ash Presto cautioned against reducing this kind of work to what she described as the “very tired, gendered cliché” that workers in the informal sector are abused and victimized, as some of them can find empowerment in it too.

“Choice is actually very important here.” Presto noted that women are often framed by society as having no agency when many are actively choosing flexible work arrangements that can be financially rewarding. She pointed out that it’s not the nature of the work but the lack of legal protections from labor disputes and workplace harassment that leaves women vulnerable within the sector.

“In terms of power dynamics, the structural ones would be in terms of gender,” explained Presto. “Obviously, it’s mostly male who are the clients, and even male chatters who would pretend to be female employees so that they can also get more commission.”

Looking at the issue from a global perspective, she highlighted the Philippines’ history as a labor-exporting country. “Chatter work is a feminized industry. There’s a lot of feminized sectors where the Philippines is known as a labor exporter — domestic work, healthcare, and increasingly, the education sector.”

The absence of specific legal frameworks for these emerging digital roles leaves workers isolated, as Philippine labor policies have yet to catch up with the unique conditions of the industry.

Organizing as a start

Labor groups say organizing workers remains key to addressing the risks faced by third-party OnlyFans workers and other “dark gig” laborers who are not visible and therefore more vulnerable to abuses.

Labor advocate Josua Mata, however, admitted that as a relatively new and fast-evolving trend, much of what happens in this line of work remains unclear even to labor advocates themselves.

The first step, he said, is to “expose the whole problem and then force a policy response.” But workers have to be organized so that they can benefit from the policy.

Beyond job classification, the core problem lies in the low visibility and weak regulation of the work itself. Because many workers are employed by companies outside the Philippines, this creates “a gray area in how you can hold them accountable,” UP School of Labor and Industrial Relations assistant professor Benjamin Velasco said.

Workers, he said, can put pressure on platforms by highlighting the companies’ reputational risks, and using international labor standards as leverage. While passing laws to protect these workers may take years, he emphasized that workers could act immediately, using public visibility to push for change and improve their situation.

Until then, Filipinos driven to this kind of work have no choice but to play Russian roulette with the job postings they find online. They are left to bear the brunt of a risky job forced upon them by a limited job market, where they must either shut up and take it, or hop from one agency to another.

Between these choices, silence is the common denominator. – Rappler.com

Anna and Kara’s names have been changed at their request. Quotes have been translated to English for brevity.

*Conversion rate as of January 26, 2026: $1 = P59.043.