Law · Investigation
A complaint filed in Chicago in March 2025 alleges that agencies impersonate creators in direct messages. Nothing in it has been proved, and the rulings so far are about where the case may be heard.
On 1 April 2025, 404 Media reported a class action filed in Chicago by two OnlyFans subscribers who said they had worked out that the person answering their messages was not the creator on the account. The article, by Samantha Cole in collaboration with Court Watch, is the reason most people know the case exists. This entry reads the filing behind it.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Case | Brunner and Fry v. Fenix Internet, LLC and Fenix International Limited |
| Number | 1:25-cv-03244 |
| Court | United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division |
| Filed | 2025-03-26 |
| Judge | John F. Kness |
| Complaint | 62 pages, jury trial demanded |
| Cause | 28:1332 Diversity, other contract. Nature of suit 190. |
Two named plaintiffs, both subscribers, sue on behalf of a proposed class. The defendants are Fenix Internet, LLC, given in the caption at an address in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Fenix International Limited, at Ninth Floor 107 Cheapside, London. 404 Media's 1 April date is the date of its reporting. The docket date is 26 March 2025.
Everything in this section is an allegation. None of it has been tested, and no court has found any of it to be true.
The complaint's central claim is that OnlyFans facilitated the use of paid third party messagers on creator accounts. In the plaintiffs' own words, at page 23:
Perhaps the most egregious activity implicitly encouraged and purposefully facilitated by OnlyFans is the use of professional "chatters" to impersonate Creators in order to manipulate Fans into paying as much as possible for PPV content and tips, turning a single Creator account into as many "personal" relationships as possible, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The complaint gives that practice a defined term of its own, which it then uses throughout. The term is the plaintiffs' label, not a finding, and this desk uses it only inside quotation marks.
At page 40, the legal framing:
Plaintiffs claim that Defendants unlawfully and improperly deceived and defrauded its Fans by allowing third parties to send communications on behalf of Creators in violation of OnlyFans' TOS
The complaint also alleges where the labour comes from, stating that agencies often use chatters from countries such as the Philippines or Venezuela, hired regardless of the gender or age of the creator they are engaged to write as.
Seven counts are pleaded: the Video Privacy Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. section 2710; breach of contract and of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing; unjust enrichment; two counts under the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act; Illinois common law fraud; and a declaratory judgment.
The complaint contains zero occurrences of the string "AI". Brunner is about human chatters and the agencies that employ them. It is routinely cited in coverage of AI chat software, and that connection is not in the document. The AI question is a separate story with a separate paper trail, which this desk covers in the OnlyFans AI chatbot rule.
The public docket records waivers of service in April 2025 and then an opposed motion to stay, filed by the defendants on 2 June 2025 as document 31. Briefing closed on 17 June 2025. A minute entry of 14 July 2025 says the motion is fully briefed and will be addressed by separate order. A minute entry of 17 July 2025 says that if the stay is denied, any motions to dismiss are due 28 days after the order on the stay.
Document 55, dated 22 October 2025, is an order on the motion to stay. Its text is not in the public RECAP archive, so the desk has not read it and does not know what it decided.
The two public trackers disagree on what happened next. PacerMonitor's public case page records "Case Filed: Mar 26, 2025 / Terminated: Oct 22, 2025". CourtListener's docket for the same case records no termination date and gives 22 October 2025 as the date of last known filing. The desk prints both and draws no conclusion.
Two rulings exist on the record, and neither is about whether anyone was deceived.
McFadden v. Fenix Internet, LLC, number 23-cv-06151, before the same judge in the Northern District of Illinois, was dismissed on 29 September 2025. The memorandum opinion and order holds:
the Court is satisfied that the forum selection clause in the OnlyFans terms of service is enforceable under the common law. Moreover, even if the common law were displaced by statutory interventions, the forum selection clause would not be considered an unfair term. Accordingly, Defendants' motion to dismiss (Dkt. 21) is granted on forum non conveniens grounds.
The opinion adds that "this is not the kind of rare or unusual case in which the parties' forum selection should be cast aside". That is a ruling about where a dispute may be brought, not about what happened in anyone's inbox. The clause it enforces is still in the live terms, which read that for users outside a named list, "the courts of England and Wales will have jurisdiction over any claim which arises out of or in connection with your agreement with us or your use of OnlyFans".
N.Z. v. Fenix International Ltd., number 8:24-cv-01655 in the Central District of California, is a separate case brought by five plaintiffs in July 2024. According to a secondary account by a law professor who follows this area, published 21 December 2025, the court dismissed it with leave to amend on 12 December 2025: section 230 barred the claims to the extent they sought to hold the defendants liable for facilitating communications with third parties, while claims based on the company's own representations survived, and the privacy and wiretap theories failed on their own terms. The same account reports monetary sanctions against plaintiffs' counsel for citations generated by a language model that did not exist. The desk has not read that order and reports this as secondary.
On 4 October 2025 The Village Voice published a piece attributing the England and Wales forum ruling to Brunner. It belongs to McFadden. Bloomberg Law, reporting on 30 September 2025, attributed it correctly, and the opinion itself carries the McFadden caption. Anyone who took the Village Voice version as their source has the wrong case on the wrong docket.
Nothing in the Brunner complaint has been proved. No court has found that OnlyFans, Fenix or any creator deceived any subscriber. The only decisions on the record so far went against the plaintiffs in the related cases: a dismissal on forum grounds in Illinois on 29 September 2025, and a dismissal with leave to amend in California on 12 December 2025. Brunner itself produced an order on 22 October 2025 whose contents are not public.
What is not disputed by anyone, because it is the subject of a public labour market, is that paid third parties write messages on creator accounts as a normal part of the industry. What that work pays is documented separately in what OnlyFans chatters are paid.
the desk · 14 September 2026 updated 2026-09-14 · checked 2026-09-14