A few months back, Lars* found a profile for porn star Jade Kush online, which featured a Skype handle for fans to contact her. So, he added her on Skype—and was thrilled when, almost immediately, she started to text him. They traded pictures and small talk about life; she called him a handsome man and got flirty, saying it didn’t matter to her that he had a wife. He asked if they could take their budding digital romance to the next level with a video chat. She requested a $100 Amazon gift card in return. He obliged. She told him not to show the card to anyone else. Then she started coming up with excuses as to why she couldn’t do the video chat—bad timing, a dirty camera lens. Lars started to get skeptical, but she insisted she loved him truly and deeply. Then she told him that she needed “some money like $300 to get some food and stuff’s in the house.”
“I promise I will never let you down,” she said. “Do this for me from your own kind heart.”
That’s when Lars found an email for the actual Jade Kush on one of her actual social media profiles, and reached out to confirm his growing suspicion: That he’d been scammed by one of a large number of fraudsters who digitally impersonate porn stars online to target their fans.
No one tracks the number of fake porn star accounts or scams connected to them. Performers say they usually only learn they’ve been impersonated if and when fans spot and alert them to bogus accounts, or scam victims reach out—often hurt and confused. Still, stars like Kendra Sunderland say they’ve been tipped off to “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of scams in recent years. “It’s been endless,” she told The Daily Beast. Performer Jayden Cole adds that she updated her Instagram bio to read, “I’m not messaging you on a ‘backup account,’” just to address this issue.
The Daily Beast recently spoke to a half-dozen major adult performers—as well as several digital-security experts—who all attested that the number of these scam accounts appears to have increased rapidly in recent months. Performer Cherie DeVille says she’s receiving twice as many reports as she used to while Vic Cipolla, who manages his wife/performer Dani Daniels’s and several other stars’ social media accounts, says the number of reports he’s fielding have increased at least tenfold. “I’ve just reported two accounts that popped up within the last 24 hours” to the sites hosting them in order to get them taken down, Cole told The Daily Beast in a phone interview.
All of these sources credited this steep spike in fake porn account scams to the coronavirus pandemic.
These grifts are a subset of what fraudsters and researchers alike refer to as eWhoring scams, in which typically men (whose IP addresses trace back to West and South Africa or Southeast Asia) pretend to be young women on dating, forum, and social media apps and sites in order to strike up conversations with dozens of people simultaneously, flatter and flirt with them, then start asking for money. While these scams have been around for over a decade, they’ve grown increasingly prevalent in recent years. The FTC noted a threefold increase in reports of “romance scams” between 2015 and 2019. When the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro reviewed several underground forums for The Daily Beast they found 26,622 posts on eWhoring between August 2018 and June 2019, and 46,651 between June 2019 and May 6, 2020.
Because scammers are always tweaking their tactics to stay a step ahead of security experts, there is a ton of variation in the way that eWhores milk their marks. Some try to get victims to click on phishing links in order to steal their personal information. Some try to sell content, which they may charge for multiple times because, oops, something went wrong with the transaction, and which almost never arrives. Some claim they’re sick, stranded, or otherwise in peril and need a bailout...perhaps in the form of a Steam gift card?
But at their core, they’re all selling intimacy to lonely hearts, often spending weeks cultivating fake relationships only to bleed their targets dry and then bail—or, as Deville puts it, “it’s not about, ‘I’ll give you anal sex if…’ It’s always, ‘I want to be your girlfriend,’ so will you…”
A scam victim “told me that he and the person pretending to be me had connected over their moms being sick,” added Sunderland, before they went for the kill. “It just broke my heart.”
Many scammers go to great lengths to convince people they and their digital love is real, even hiring women to call needy or doubtful targets. Adult performer Ember Snow told The Daily Beast about one victim who contacted her. “He tried to do a phone call to verify [the scammer] was me” and spoke to someone. But “he said the girl on the phone sounded reluctant, nervous. And he could hear a man’s voice in the background, giving her instructions on what to say.”
Seasoned scammers sell eWhoring tutorials, mentoring services, and starter packs complete with images, videos, and scripts. Jay, an eWhorer who offers these services, tells The Daily Beast that most packs pull content from porn sites: clothed images to start things out, then increasingly graphic shots to step up the intimacy of a conversation, or to sell a mark. But most eWhorers put a premium on unsaturated content—images other scammers haven’t used that people will be less likely to recognize. So, scammers tend to target new stars, or pull content from revenge porn sites. Most who use established performers’ content invent fake names and identities and edit the images to make them harder to reverse image search. Almost no guides recommend actually pretending to be the porn star whose content one steals, because it’s so easy to get caught.
Yet, Jay notes, “definitely eWhoring with [a] porn star’s name and images is very common.” It’s a low-effort approach: Just subscribe to their sites, take their content, and copy their voice and style—sometimes verbatim. “On Twitter, they’ll write stuff word-for-word that I’ve written on my actual account,” says performer Sarah Russi. They may even include links to a performer’s actual website or acquire a deceptively-similar social-media handle to make their accounts seem more legitimate. Then they start reaching out to everyone on social media who interacts with content related to the performer they’re copying—and some will be willing to pay through the nose to interact with the star of their dreams. They try to convince these marks they’re messaging from a smaller private account they use to talk to people they really like, and bank on them wanting to believe it’s true.
“I have had scammers try to scam me using my wife’s images,” Cipolla tells The Daily Beast. So clearly, this shotgun-blast approach has limits. But Cambridge University cybercrime researcher Alice Hutchings, who’s analyzed scam forums, notes that the average eWhoring transaction runs between $5 and $50, and an account nets a total of about $775. Meanwhile “Killer Grandpa,” a scam baiter who searches for fraudsters on Instagram to strike up conversations with them, waste their time, then report them to stars and site admins, notes that fraudsters sell cheap content, but also ask for deposits ranging from $100 to $500 for future in-person meet-ups, plus money for airfare.
So, making a few sales before they get caught can put them ahead of the curve. Some victims The Daily Beast has learned of have blown upwards of $10,000 on a scammer. The FTC found that in 2019, romance schemes writ large cost victims $2,600 on average, $10,000 for those over the age of 70, and have cost some people up to $100,000, making them one of the most expensive single scam categories in the U.S. (They took $143 million from consumers in 2018.)
Plus, getting caught isn’t the end of the world. Many scammers run multiple accounts simultaneously, and generate new accounts as old ones die—sometimes near-clones of their old handles for the same star.
Fake accounts also frequently exploit the popular fiction that porn is a grim criminal world full of danger—and many fans’ desire to be white knights, riding to a star’s rescue. They can wrest hundreds of dollars out of people with sob stories about managers-cum-pimps stealing all of their money, leaving them with nothing for food or their grandma’s meds. The Daily Beast found three distinct instances of fake accounts claiming they’d been kidnapped while visiting West Africa, either for work or in an attempt to escape the evil adult industry, and needed their fan to send $500 to help them escape.
Many eWhoring scam victims never report accounts to authorities, sites, or stars because they are ashamed. And Lindsay Yanko of Trend Micro notes that fake porn account victims are especially unlikely to file reports, because they don’t want anyone to know they would have spent so much on a porn star, much less that they got duped because of that willingness. So many scammers may feel even in normal times that impersonating a porn star is particularly low risk, high reward.
Then you throw the coronavirus pandemic into the mix. Jay has observed “a huge increase in people trying to get back into eWhoring” after a break, “or just people wanting to eWhore” for the first time for money—or, some forum-goers say, for a diversion from lockdown doldrums.
The eWhore crowd believes they can prey on bored, horny, lonely people trapped at home. Sure, many may have less money to spend. But as an eWhorer using the name “Simplex” wrote on one of their forums recently, that means you “just have to find the right people.” Once you do, it may actually be easier to get them to suspend their doubts, because lockdowns offer a great excuse for why you can’t meet in person, why you can’t fix your camera to video chat with them, and why you might need an emergency infusion of cash immediately. Others posting in the same forum have argued that they’re bilking more people out of more money than ever before.
In one insidious example, Kush recently learned an account has been operating, using her name, image, and modified actual Instagram account content since March 15. This fake Kush talks about how lockdowns have limited her shooting schedule, giving her plenty of time to talk to, and make content for, fans. She links to what looks like a tiny URL for OnlyFans, which actually leads to a likely phishing site—a link that appears on several other Twitter accounts which use similar language and appear to impersonate a number of adult cam performers. And on March 19, she started posting about how, in recognition of the pandemic, she planned to make all her premium content free via that link, but would welcome tips which “will be automatically go to a nonprofit foundation that helps the victim of COVID-19 [sic]. Are you interested to help?”
Meanwhile, social media sites are openly acknowledging they have reduced their report review operations during the pandemic. Many critics argue that these platforms are slow to act on fraud reports in the best of times—especially for porn stars. But now performers have almost no way to get accounts taken down in an even remotely timely manner. Some have tried to confront scammers directly, only to get you blocked by their accounts, making it harder to see what the scammer is actually doing. Some add that confrontations have led to attacks on their accounts (from hacking to spam reporting), creating a risk that they will go dark, leaving the scam account the only landing pad for fans for a time. After Rose told a scammer she would file a copyright-infringement case to take their account down if they didn’t do it of their own accord—a time-consuming process—he sent her a death threat. Now, she says, she’ll never engage a scammer herself directly again.
Performers have a hard time estimating how much they lose to these scams because the number of scammers and victims is so murky. But everyone The Daily Beast canvassed for this article doubted that scams make a serious dent in their income. That’s why some stars, like Misty Stone, say they would rather choose not to think too much about this issue, or monitor it closely. “I wish I could adopt that mentality, and maybe someday I will,” says Rose. “But…it still bothers me.”
DeVille says she, like Rose, mostly monitors scams—and pays $500 a month for a professional service to help her report and get up to 50 accounts taken down every week—on principle. They just don’t like the idea of someone taking their money, tarnishing their brands or hurting their fans. “I just personally find those people so fucking disgusting,” DeVille says. “It’s so upsetting.”
The toll on fans who get sucked into a scam, meanwhile, is often clear. While the FTC notes that victims can sometimes recoup losses if they report fraud to banks, card companies, retailers, and wire-transfer services, that is not always the case. And often the damages they incur go far beyond financial costs. Performer Tanya Tate shared a correspondence with The Daily Beast between her and a scam victim who found her on a paid chat platform recently. Over the course of their chat, it becomes clear that a scammer pretending to be Tate convinced this man, over a three-week courtship, to sell most of his belongings to fund their fake affair and buy a ticket to fly a thousand miles, ostensibly to meet and marry Tate. He only realized he had been scammed by contacting the real Tate and seemed, as she put it, “devastated.”
Half of the victims who reach out to DeVille—only for her to have to explain that they were scammed—are understanding, if hurt, she says. But the other half are convinced that she was the one who played them and “send me hate mail, like: ‘You stupid cunt. You took $100,000 from me. I’m gonna find you. I’m gonna find your family.’ Then they sometimes do find my family.”
Several performers The Daily Beast spoke to said they’ve had similar encounters in person, when victims showed up at clubs where they’re making appearances. Cole claims that two of her friends have stopped feature dancing because of these uncomfortable interactions. “You always worry when you go out—when’s the guy going to show up with the gun, the knife,” says Cipolla. “Somebody’s going to get hurt…We had a woman show up at our old apartment, try to come in, because she felt like she had been talking to Dani. She was planning to move in.”
No one The Daily Beast spoke to for this story had any ideas on how to handle the rising threat of these scam accounts, save to urge fans—i.e. potential victims—to stay vigilant and skeptical.
“Fans need to realize that we will never have ‘private pages for special fans’ that have like 100 followers and through which we message them first,” says Kush. “Most of us will also never directly ask for money, or set up escort meets through our Instagram inboxes.”
Even if fans do manage to avoid scams, that’s little comfort to impersonated performers like DeVille who find all of this deeply insulting. “We’re sex workers,” she tells The Daily Beast. “We work so fucking hard. And the world shits on us so much. Then you have this whole other group of people trying to shit on us some more? Come on, guys, can you give us a break? We don’t even have the money that mainstream celebrities have to deal with this sort of thing.”
“We’re easy targets.”
