Porn site ‘OnlyFans’ is to be sold for $8 billion, according to sources close to the company.
Reuters reported that the owners, Fenix International Ltd, are in talks with an investor group to sell the pornography filled platform, which boomed during the covid 19 lockdowns.
The site enables those involved in digital prostitution to charge subscribers a fee to access the explicit content they create, with the platform taking a 20% cut of the earnings.
The sole shareholder of the platform is Ukrainian-American, Leonid Radvinsky, who bought OnlyFans in 2018 and has received at least $1 billion in dividends over the past three years, according to British financial filings.
The site is being investigated by British regulatory body Ofcom, who say it is not doing enough to prevent children from accessing the explicit content it hosts.
The site has also been flagged for hosting what is suspected to be images of child-sexual exploitation.
Matt W.J. Richardson, head of intelligence at The Canadian Open Source Intelligence Centre, reported 26 pages on the site in respect of this.
In an interview given to Reuters, he said, “What is alarming is the scope and scale of it,”.
Reuters published a seven part series of investigative reports on the platform related to “allegations of rape, sexual abuse and betrayal”, that children were being “exploited” on the platform, women describing lives of “isolation, servitude, and sexual torment”.
Last year a New Jersey man was jailed after pleading guilty to sharing child sex abuse imagery of a 16-year-old girl onto OnlyFans.
US authorities said that Ethan Diaz met the girl and solicited the child to produce the explicit content.
At the time of his court appearance, OnlyFans did not provide comment on the findings, but said that it vets every user and all content to keep children off the site.