Former OnlyFans recruiter recalls horrors that made her quit website, seek Jesus
Victoria Sinis used to recruit women to sell their bodies on OnlyFans, but the strange fetish requests and pornographic content led her to question her career, an inner conviction that ultimately led her to Christ.
The Melbourne, Australia-based Sinis told The Christian Post in an interview that she didn't fully understand what the platform was truly like until she started working for an OnlyFans agency.
She had a background in marketing and helping people build businesses, so when a close friend approached her in August 2022 about starting an OnlyFans agency, it seemed like the ideal opportunity to utilize her skills.
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"I really didn't have much knowledge about what OnlyFans was," Sinis said. "I had never watched porn in my life, and even now, for a lot of people, there is still an enigma around OnlyFans."
"People think, 'Oh, you can just sell your feet on there,' or 'I think it's liberating,'" the former recruiter said regarding the misconceptions many have about the platform.
"And so for me, I was like, 'OK, these girls that were doing OnlyFans came from poor backgrounds and, on the surface level, it seems like they're happy. It seems like they're making good money, so this must be something positive.'"
Today, Sinis is the founder of Creating Gems, an organization that helps women break free from harmful societal expectations, and she also speaks out about the dangers of OnlyFans. But before she became an anti-sexual exploitation advocate, Sinis' job was vastly different from what she does now.
Some see OnlyFans as empowering, she said, because it seemingly allows women to control the type of content they create for the subscribers who pay a monthly membership fee to unlock images, videos and livestreams made by OnlyFans creators.
But once a girl's account reaches a certain level, she can no longer facilitate all the subscribers, which is where the agency comes in.
The agency hires contractors to imitate the girl and talk with subscribers, ensuring the account continues to make money. In addition to facilitating communications with subscribers, the agency ensures the girl posts suggestive content on social media to advertise her OnlyFans account. An OnlyFans agency will also scout out girls on social media to recruit them for the platform, usually targeting the ones who have posted provocative pictures.
While some girls may think they can post content within their comfort zone and continue gaining traction, Sinis said the platform is competitive. Girls would often realize they couldn't make enough money posting content that aligned with their comfort levels, as their subscribers would keep demanding to see more.
"And then, as an agency, we had these things called levels," the former OnlyFans recruiter said. "When you came into an agency, we told you what your baseline standard was."
The levels would range from things like bikini wear (level 1) to implied nudity (level 2) and full nudity (level 3). The higher the level goes, the more explicit the content.
Sinis said she came up with the idea of having people start with implied nudity at level 1, noting that people could find bikini pictures on Instagram. The former recruiter said she proposed this idea because she realized this was a way the platform could make more money.
"So if you did sign up for an agency, your baseline level already was you at least had to have implied nudity in all of the content you were doing," she said.
The former recruiter eventually began questioning the work she was involved in and its impact on the girls creating content for the platform.
'It really disturbed me'
One OnlyFans feature that particularly disturbed Sinis was something known as custom requests. Through this feature, subscribers could make the girls do almost anything to sexually arouse them.
Sinis began to feel disgusted and horrified by some of the subscribers' demands, which sometimes included requests for girls to write things like "Slut” on their stomachs. Some girls would be asked to write the subscriber's name on a certain part of their bodies or to post pictures of themselves tied up.
Another request involving balloons made it apparent to Sinis that subscribers could make women appeal to all sorts of fetishes. A male OnlyFans customer once paid a girl to wear a specific type of sandal, blow balloons up to a certain size, and then stomp on them.
"Some people may go, 'Oh, that's just a joke,' but no," Sinis said. "Someone paid good money, and they got sexually aroused by girls stomping on balloons. And it was so specific that it really disturbed me."
One subscriber wanted to see a woman dangle from a ledge while another woman stepped on her fingers. Sinis couldn't help but wonder how long a man who became sexually aroused by a woman dangling from a ledge would be satisfied with just watching something pretend.
"Soon enough, the video is not going to be enough," she said. "And they're actually going to want to put someone in danger or hurt them because they now need to act out this fantasy because we're feeding into these sick and twisted requests."
"When you pull on the thread a bit and think about the psychology behind it, you're like, 'Oh, wow. That's really twisted.'"
As Sinis began to struggle with her job, she asked others who worked for the agency about what was happening on OnlyFans.
Some agency workers tried to assure Sinis that the platform provided people with a safe place to do porn, similar to how a heroine user may need a safe place to do drugs. Others, however, seemed to bury their heads in the sand, according to Sinis.
The struggle of working for an OnlyFans agency grew, and it reached a point where she couldn't even bring herself to open her laptop most days.
She offset the bad by doing something good, such as helping refugees. Sinis had also previously worked in the cannabis industry and thought of starting her own company instead of continuing to work for an OnlyFans agency.
"So, I was like, 'Amazing!' I'll go away and help refugees, and then I won't have to work for OnlyFans anymore. I remembered the church I went to as a little kid had this refugee program, and I was like, 'Oh, cool! I'm going to sign up for that, and all of the things will fall into place.'"
'I knew that God was real'
As a child, Sinis attended a church called CityLife, but the household she grew up in wasn't religious, and she remembered her family would usually duck out of the services early. When Sinis was about 10 or 11, she recalled that her family stopped attending church.
While her family wasn't religious, and she did not attend youth groups or Christian camps, she never forgot a story a children's pastor told one Sunday.
When Sinis was around age 4, a pastor told the kids a story about a gunman threatening to shoot a woman unless she denounced Christ. The woman refused, and miraculously, the gun did not go off. The former recruiter didn't know if the story was true, but she never forgot it.
"I've always just had this thing in my heart," Sinis said. "I never denounced God. There was always that underlying sense 'I knew that God was real. I knew that God existed.'"
When she reached out to her childhood church to look into helping refugees, she was invited to attend a service. Sinis arrived at church, and the woman speaking before the congregation that day happened to be Melinda Tankard Reist, a movement director for the anti-sexual exploitation group Collective Shout.
Sinis became emotional as Reist spoke about the dangers of today's oversexualized culture and how Christians are meant to be the "salt and light" while on earth. The movement director highlighted the dangers of websites like OnlyFans, which resonated with Sinis.
After the speech, Sinis introduced herself to Reist, saying, "Hi, my name is Victoria. I work for OnlyFans, and I hate myself." Reist listened to the young woman's story, responding kindly when Sinis asked if it was true that OnlyFans provided a "safe space" for people to do porn.
"She educated me on the reality of what it was," Sinis said. "And that was on a Sunday. By that Friday, I quit the agency."
'Everything I do is for Jesus'
After quitting her job at the agency in July 2023, Sinis began working at a cafe. The job included cleaning toilets, but Sinis found the work humbling. Rediscovering her faith in God, Sinis changed her life around.
With Reist's help, Sinis began speaking at schools and sharing her story.
One of Sinis' speeches went viral on TikTok, and the advocate took the time to fast and contemplate what the Lord wanted her to do next.
The three-day fast led to the founding of Creating Gems, and now, Sinis speaks to girls about the reality of platforms like OnlyFans. The organization helps to educate young girls to "understand their intrinsic value, to understand they are made for so much more than to be 'hot' or to aspire to be an OnlyFans girl."
Samantha Kamman is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: samantha.kamman@christianpost.com. Follow her on Twitter: @Samantha_Kamman
