I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty

I liked the idea that my foremost duty as an OnlyFans chatter should be to comfort the afflicted rather than wheedle the sexually frustrated into buying pricey “nudes and lewds” content. But I balked when the founder suggested that I start as his intern, an arrangement I suspected would lead to weeks of unpaid labor. I didn’t want to end up like so many of my peers on r/OnlyFansChatter, who called out deadbeats in angry posts littered with all caps text.

Good news finally arrived in the form of a kind email from an agency representative I’ll call Janko. After I confirmed that I’d be willing to work for $5 per hour plus a 0.5 percent sales commission, Janko had me take a brief test. The trickiest of the three short-answer questions asked me to imagine that I was chatting with a 34-year-old construction site inspector who is a lonely virgin and cat owner. If this man was droning on and on about how much he hates his job, how would I nudge our chat in a happier direction?

I thought back to something Bel, the Argentinian chatter, had told me about her approach to such situations. A longtime writer of fan fiction about the Yakuza video games as well as a connoisseur of erotic audio stories, Bel had an excellent feel for how to get a chat back on track. “You can say, ‘Oh, I had this really hot dream,’” she said, “or, ‘Oh, I just saw this porn video.’ And you guide the conversation from there.”

I took the first of Bel’s recommended approaches, keeping in mind that my customer seemed to be a sensitive soul. I told the subscriber I had dreamed of him cooking for me in his apartment as I snuggled up on the sofa with his cat. “And I was watching you in the kitchen making me dinner, except now you were wearing something different—these gray sweatpants that really showed off your body,” I wrote. “I felt so happy in that moment.”

Janko pronounced himself a fan of my cringey work, a bit of validation that I relished too much. He followed that praise, however, with a rude surprise: He didn’t have a job to give me. His agency had vetted me so that I could be placed in the recruiting pool for an entirely different agency, a firm that manages some of OnlyFans’ biggest accounts. So I couldn’t get to work right away, but would instead be admitted to a Discord server with scores of other candidates from around the world. It was there that we would receive the training and testing required to become chatters for the sorts of superstar models who have a million-plus followers on Instagram and TikTok.

“We wish you luck and the only advice I have for you is feel free to be greedy and push for sales as much as you can,” wrote Janko. “We like the approach you have and have high hopes for you.”

There were supposedly three steps to securing a full-time job with the big agency. The first was to attend a series of tutorials led by one of the firm’s principals, a master chatter whom I’ll call Luka. I would then have to take yet another test—a longer, more in-depth version of the one I’d aced for Janko. If I scored high enough, I’d be assigned to shadow some accomplished chatters as they handled major accounts. Once I’d observed a few of these pros function in real time, I would finally be slotted into an eight-hour shift.

At the onset of my initial training session, held in a Discord voice channel, Luka distributed a link to a Google Doc that contained his collected wisdom on the subject of chatting. It included a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who was identified as an American president: “The potential is untapped, dealing with PEOPLE, you may never know what’s awaiting behind the next chat.”