On June 10, 2026, a man in Bellevue, Washington, was charged with four counts of human trafficking, one count of money laundering, and one count of leading organized crime after investigators discovered he was forcing women to perform on an adult cam site and create content for OnlyFans and collecting their account earnings.
Nikita Tyukalo, 21, is accused of maintaining control over four women using physical abuse, threats, and sextortion.
Court documents indicate that several women were forced to work 14-hour days, seven days a week, streaming on Chaturbate (adult cam site) and producing content for OnlyFans.
Tyukalo supplied the victims with Adderall to keep them working, according to the court documents. They were not allowed to know how much money these accounts were making, and they had no freedom.
As digital content becomes more profitable, it is no surprise traffickers are using these platforms as another stream of income.
In a nutshell, OnlyFans.com is a monetized social media platform. While Instagram allows users to follow people at no cost, OnlyFans charges a subscription fee to follow content creators.
Adam Dodge, founder of EndTab, describes OnlyFans as “Instagram meets PornHub,” in the World Without Exploitation Speaker Series in 2020 “OnlyFans and the Growth of Online Exploitation During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
The way OnlyFans works is content creators must verify their identity by submitting their ID, and subscribers have the capability to remain anonymous.
That does not prevent those accounts from being taken over by a potential trafficker, however.
The anonymity of the subscribers makes it difficult to hold people accountable.
OnlyFans makes sex trafficking much easier for perpetrators. Considering how much time and cross promotion it takes for one content creator to get one subscribers, traffickers capitalize on this.
In the 2020 session, Dodge proved prophetic in his assertion about what OnlyFans will become for traffickers.
According to Dodge, they become “OnlyFans Managers,” to the content creators, demanding full access to the account (and the money) under the guise of offering a service. In the end, they take that money and gain full control of the account, which could lead to maintaining control over the content creator.
“If I was a trafficker, and I wanted to create a site to get new targets, I would have created OnlyFans,” said Dodge.
OnlyFans is on the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s Dirty Dozen list, citing its inability to protect sexual assault survivors and child sexual abuse survivors after content was uploaded on the site of the abuse.