Visa and Mastercard Kept Settling OnlyFans Charges After a Whistleblower Says They Were Warned About Child Sexual Abuse Material
The whistleblower did not tell the U.S. Treasury that OnlyFans had stored a video. He told the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network that Visa and Mastercard kept settling the charge after they had already been walked through what the charge was buying. The complaint went in during January 2023. It sat. On January 24, 2025, Reuters published it. In the summer of 2026, plaintiffs’ lawyers in a different federal case put that same story in front of a judge who was deciding how much of a trafficking lawsuit against Visa gets to stay alive.
That is the part a content-moderation headline misses. The defendant in the Treasury filing is not the website. It is the pipe. Card networks sit between a subscriber and a creator on almost every paid view. If the whistleblower is right, the two largest networks in the world processed proceeds of child sexual abuse material and sex trafficking after they had notice, and then described their compliance programs as if notice had never arrived.
What the Sealed Complaint Actually Alleges
The whistleblower, a senior payments-compliance specialist who asked not to be named, sent the filing to FinCEN and also to the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. He told Reuters that federal agents and anti-trafficking researchers joined calls with both brands in 2021 and 2022. On those calls, he said, agents corroborated that child sexual abuse material was on OnlyFans. The complaint leans on a 2022 review by the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative, a U.S. nonprofit that reported a high volume of OnlyFans accounts carrying common indicators of child sexual abuse material or trafficking. That review, the filing says, was handed to Visa and Mastercard.
The legal theory is willfulness under the Bank Secrecy Act. Willfulness here is not a confession. It is a paper trail: warnings, a shared study, continued settlement of the merchant’s charges. The complaint says that by keeping the rails open, the companies “willfully failed” to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program and handled illicit proceeds. The whistleblower later told Reuters that no federal agency had called him back to discuss the complaint. FinCEN’s practice is to neither confirm nor deny a filing. Justice and Homeland Security declined to comment when the story broke. Neither network has announced a public FinCEN enforcement action on these facts, and no indictment has been unsealed.
The Denials Are a Script, and the Off Switch Is Real
Mastercard answered Reuters by pointing to “strong governance standards,” a compliance program, and internal controls, and said it works with partners to act when illegal activity is identified. Visa said it uses controls to deter, detect, and remediate illegal activity, and that a merchant who stays non-compliant can have its contract terminated. OnlyFans said it has zero tolerance for child exploitation and that it works aggressively to target, report, and support prosecutions of anyone who tries to abuse the platform.
Those sentences are familiar because the brands have used them before, and because they have also proved they can move faster than a paragraph. In December 2020, after reporting documented underage content on Pornhub, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cut the site off. The revenue engine stalled in days. In 2021, a BBC investigation found explicit videos of underage teens on OnlyFans. Payment partners pushed the company toward a ban on pornography. OnlyFans announced one, then reversed it within days after creators revolted. One hundred and two members of Congress asked the Justice Department to investigate that year. What the department did with the letter has never been made public.
The contrast is the case. A network that can end a platform in a week is not a passive pipe. A network that says it “acts when it sees” illegal activity is describing a program whose speed depends on who is doing the seeing. The whistleblower’s point is that the seeing had already happened on recorded calls, and the charges kept clearing.
Reuters Kept Finding Accounts After the Complaint Was Filed
The Treasury filing is not the only public record. Reuters later examined U.S. police and court files and reported dozens of complaints, dating from December 2019 through June 2024, alleging that explicit images of minors had appeared on OnlyFans. Those files, the newsroom said, cited more than 200 videos and images of children, including material involving very young victims. In December 2024, Matt W.J. Richardson, head of intelligence at the Canadian Open Source Intelligence Centre, told Reuters he had reported 26 OnlyFans accounts to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He believed the accounts contained sexual content of underage girls, that some accounts featured more than one girl, and that promotional links suggested a single operator. Within a day of his December 16 report, he said, the accounts were gone.
Speed after a tip is not the same thing as catching the material before it is sold. A platform with millions of users and a few million creators cannot be watched frame by frame by a card brand. That is the industry’s favorite sentence, and it is true as far as it goes. The Bank Secrecy Act does not require Visa to hire a moderator for every clip. It requires an anti-money-laundering program that works once the company has reason to know a merchant is a problem. Pornhub showed the off switch. The OnlyFans file asks why the same switch was not thrown after the 2021 and 2022 warnings the complaint describes.
A Los Angeles Judge Let a Different Visa Claim Live
On September 26, 2025, U.S. District Judge Wesley L. Hsu in Los Angeles dismissed the claims against Visa in Fleites v. MindGeek, the long-running case brought by survivors who say they were trafficked as minors onto Pornhub and related sites. The plaintiffs amended. Visa moved to dismiss again. On July 9, 2026, after argument on June 18, Judge Hsu denied that motion in part. He let Serena Fleites proceed on a claim of conspiracy to violate the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and on a California unfair-competition claim. He dismissed a separate civil-conspiracy count with prejudice. The order is not a finding that Visa broke the law. It is a finding that the amended complaint alleges enough to force the company to answer on those counts.
The OnlyFans whistleblower story is not the subject of that order. It showed up anyway. In a May 2026 declaration opposing a sanctions motion, plaintiffs’ counsel cited the Reuters account and argued that card-industry enforcement has been fiercest where the companies fear losing money and weakest where the fees from high-volume adult traffic keep coming. That is a litigation tactic, not a verdict. It matters because the sealed FinCEN file has produced no public charge, while a civil courtroom is now the place where the same theory of “notice plus continued processing” has to be briefed under oath. The AEGIS Alliance has covered the older version of that theory in the banks that kept Jeffrey Epstein, including the Bank of America settlement with abuse survivors. Different institution. Same question about what notice is supposed to do.
Civil Lawyers Are Waiting on a Door the Government Has Not Opened
After the Reuters story, plaintiffs’ firms including Sauder Schelkopf and Girard Sharp said they were investigating claims on behalf of people monetized on the platform. A class action is not a Treasury penalty. It needs a survivor who can show the harm, and it needs discovery that drags the 2021 and 2022 calls out of a compliance archive. FinCEN whistleblower rules are built to keep those papers inside the government. Plaintiffs’ lawyers are built to demand copies. The two systems do not meet unless a judge or a prosecutor makes them.
No one should confuse a denied motion to dismiss in a Pornhub case with proof of the OnlyFans allegations. Visa and Mastercard dispute those allegations, and OnlyFans disputes the idea that it tolerates the material. What the public can see, without a leak and without a plea, is narrower and still damning as a policy fact. The brands have an off switch. They have used it. A compliance specialist says he and federal agents showed them a reason to use it on this merchant years before Reuters ever printed his name, and the charges kept moving. Until FinCEN speaks, or a complaint survives in open court, that is the entire record. It is not a clearance. It is a silence with a date on it.
Related coverage of financial crime and exploitation cases is filed under crime news and U.S. news.
