For a long time, OnlyFans was considered the white knight among porn platforms. The image is now suffering. Behind the billion-dollar business is “Britain’s number one porn family” – and a businessman whose practices are considered to be quite “sleazy”.
The OnlyFans platform is considered a game changer for the adult industry. For a monthly fee, the performers offer their content to the fans and thus control the value-added process themselves. OnlyFans keeps 20 percent of the subscription sales.
For many “creators” this is a pretty fair deal, because in the classic porn industry, by no means 80 percent of the sales end up on their account. However, if you take a look at the pullers behind the porn empire, it suddenly doesn’t seem quite so clean anymore.
Locked up in their own four walls, many people subscribed to OnlyFans during the Corona lockdown. The website saw a 540 percent increase in revenue to around $2 billion between 2019 and 2020 alone, according to data from Bloomberg.
What many consider a sleazy site at best is now a corporation that can keep up with large companies in terms of sales. Today OnlyFans has over 180 million registered users and more than two million creators. For comparison: Netflix is currently used by around 220 million people worldwide.
Behind the OnlyFans platform is a seemingly normal family business from Essex, Great Britain. For the Stokelys, the porn business has always been a “family tradition”. British media have already named the Stokely clan “Britain’s number one porn family”.
OnlyFans was founded by father Guy Stokely, once an investment banker at Barclays. He ran the London-based company Fenix International, which operates OnlyFans. His wife Deborah and three of his four children are involved in the business.
Little is known about the company behind OnlyFans. Fenix International’s website only states that it offers computer-related services. The homepage consists of only one page and was last updated in 2021.
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Tim Stokely, Guy Stokely’s 39-year-old son, is said to have had the idea for the goldsmiths. His first ventures were the websites GlamGirls and Customs4U, which set him in the direction he perfected at OnlyFans.
He finally founded OnlyFans in 2016 with his older brother Thomas Stokely – and with the help of a £10,000 loan from his father.
In 2018, Stokely sold 75 percent of Fenix International to Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American businessman and owner of porn site MyFreeCams. There creators perform live in front of the webcam.
The little that is known about Radvinsky does not reflect well on him. Around 20 years ago, before internet pornography was freely available, several sources say he ran a number of websites that advertised access to “illegal” and “hacked” passwords for porn sites – including those promoting underage performers.
Forbes reported in 2021 that it had unearthed 11 websites said to have been created by Radvinsky and his Illinois-based company Cybertania in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Ultra Passwords page promised a link with “the best illegal teenage passwords” and “the hottest bestiality site on the internet”. Bestiality means sex with an animal.
However, according to the Forbes journalists, there is no evidence that proves a direct connection between Radvinsky’s pages and child pornography or bestiality. The links would usually go to similar sites that offer more links to free porn passwords or other adult content. However, Radvinsky is said to have earned money with every click on these links.
The US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has received numerous reports from several banks involved in Radvinsky’s business, according to Forensic News. including MFCXY, revealed.
Forensic News journalists spoke to some of the content creators of Radvinsky’s sites. The creators said their accounts on the platforms were arbitrarily deleted and the money they made from them disappeared.
According to an investigation by the British BBC, OnlyFans also have problems with underage performers. The site doesn’t independently verify the age of its sex workers, so it’s pretty easy for people to lie. A 14-year-old girl is said to have created an account as an actress on OnlyFans with her grandmother’s passport.
Signy Arnason, deputy executive director of the Canadian Center for Child Protection, told Forbes that her work often involves reporting that OnlyFans may have underage models. She describes the platform’s efforts to protect minors as “minimal.”
Tim Stokely, meanwhile, resigned from his post as OnlyFans CEO in 2021. The expectation of his successor, the Indian-American businesswoman Amrapali Gan: to thoroughly clean up the shop.
