Scammers Use Deepfakes to Impersonate OnlyFans Creators

The reported harm extends beyond charge disputes. USA TODAY reported that creator Jessieanna Campbell receives messages from people who believe they paid her $150 through Cash App before being blocked by an impersonator. The Riverfront Times, also reporting on the cases, described scams in which impersonators allegedly invoke fabricated emergencies, including claims involving a creator's child, to pressure targets into sending money.

USA TODAY reported that creator Shaghana Doyle had people who interacted with an impersonator arrive at her home believing they had developed a relationship with her. That reported outcome illustrates a particular risk of high-fidelity impersonation: the attack can combine payment fraud with identity abuse and potential physical-world harassment.

Impostor accounts predate generative AI, and creators have used Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests to remove copied material, USA TODAY reported. The difference in the reported cases is the use of synthetic speech and moving video, which can make a fake account appear more credible than a profile built only from reposted photos.

Reba Rocket, co-chief executive of Takedown Piracy, told the Riverfront Times that clients spend roughly $45 to $150 per month on content-removal efforts. The publication reported that the company has removed nearly 400 million pieces of infringing content in total. Those figures concern the firm's wider takedown activity, not solely the OnlyFans impersonation cases.

Malwarebytes noted that the U.S. Take It Down Act criminalizes non-consensual explicit content, including AI-generated images, and includes platform takedown requirements. Its applicability can vary by the facts of an individual impersonation and by where content is hosted, however. The Riverfront Times reported that some infringements are hosted in jurisdictions where requests can be ignored.

For security teams and trust-and-safety practitioners, the cases show how inexpensive generative media can be paired with familiar account-takeover patterns: copied source material, cross-platform migration, urgency cues, and hard-to-reverse payment rails. Organizations facing comparable impersonation campaigns often need to treat detection, creator verification, takedown workflows, and user education as connected controls rather than isolated moderation tasks.