The company behind the adult services site OnlyFans has been slammed by Ofcom for failing to accurately respond to formal requests for information about its age assurance measures on the platform.
Gathering accurate information from regulated companies is fundamental to Ofcom’s role as a regulator. Firms are required, by law, to respond to all statutory information requests in an accurate, complete and timely way.
In June 2022 and June 2023, Ofcom sought information from Fenix International Limited on the age assurance measures it had in place on OnlyFans. This included asking how the platform was implementing age checks and, specifically, about the effectiveness of OnlyFans’ third-party facial estimation technology.
These requests were part of an information gathering exercise by Ofcom – using its powers under regulations that pre-date the Online Safety Act – to monitor how video-sharing platforms were keeping children safe online. The information was published in a report on Ofcom’s first year of regulating VSPs in October 2022.
As part of its submission, Fenix stated that it had directed its third-party provider to set a ‘challenge age’ for its facial age estimation technology at 23 years old.
The technology works by requiring a prospective user to upload a live selfie, which it then uses to estimate their age. If the tool estimates the prospective user’s age as being above the challenge age, they can continue to create an account on the OnlyFans platform. Any user not estimated to be above the challenge age is required to verify that they are over 18 via a secondary method.
On January 4 2024, Fenix learned from its technology provider that the challenge age for OnlyFans was in fact set at 20 years old, not 23 years old. Fenix later confirmed it had been set to 20 since November 1 2021.
After learning this, Fenix elected to raise the challenge age to 23 on 16 January 16 2025, but then changed it again to 21 years old on January 19 2025. Fenix only first informed Ofcom about the error on January 22 2024.
Given this disclosure and following engagement with the company to clarify the impact of the potential breach, Ofcom launched an investigation in May last year to review whether Fenix had failed to comply with its duties to provide complete and accurate information to the regulator.
Taking all the evidence into account, Ofcom’s investigation concluded that Fenix contravened its duties to provide accurate and complete information in response to two statutory information requests.
Ofcom expects that robust checks are in place to ensure information is properly interrogated, crosschecked, and reviewed through appropriate channels, prior to it being submitted in response to a formal information request.
It investigation raised a number of concerns, including that it took the company over 16 months to discover that it had provided Ofcom with inaccurate information. The regulator says it believes robust fact checking processes would have resulted in the incorrect submission coming to light sooner.
As a result of these failings, Ofcom has imposed a financial penalty on Fenix of £1.05m, which will be passed on to HM Treasury. This includes a 30% reduction from the penalty it would otherwise have imposed, as a result of resource savings achieved through Fenix accepting the findings and settling the case.
Ofcom enforcement director Suzanne Cater said: “When we use our statutory powers to request information from platforms, they are required, by law, to ensure it is complete, accurate and delivered to us on time.
“Receiving accurate and complete information is fundamental for Ofcom to do its job as a regulator and to understand and monitor how platforms are operating. We will hold platforms to high standards and will not hesitate to take enforcement action where we find failings.”
In response to the ruling, a statement from Yoti reads: “OnlyFans uses Yoti facial age estimation technology to help ensure age-appropriate experiences and keep minors off their platform.
“The issue reported today relates to OnlyFans inadvertently reporting to Ofcom that they had set a threshold of 23 years when they had actually set it at 20 years.
“OnlyFans has always proactively elected to set the threshold for Yoti above 18 years old. The threshold is always set by the business, rather than by Yoti, as it is always the responsibility of each business to set an appropriate threshold either in compliance with regulatory requirements or to meet their internal operating policies.”
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