Jessieanna Campbell, an OnlyFans creator and friend of St. James, says she often gets messages from fans claiming they talked to her on TikTok before being directed to Snapchat, where scammers have then sent CashApp links to pay for “exclusive content.” After the scammer receives the money, they block the fan.

“I get messages all the time, like, ‘Hey, why did you take my $150 and block me?’ and I'm like, ‘What are you talking about?’” she tells USA TODAY.

Fellow creator Shaghana Doyle says fans who were being misled by imposter accounts have shown up at her home. At times, she's felt unsafe leaving her house by herself.

These impersonators and scammers tie into a broader issue regarding how AI-generation tools are being used to enable cybercriminals. Digital-forgery fraud, which includes deepfakes, cloned voices and digitally altered ID documents used to deceive victims, has surged alongside the rise of generative AI. According to Entrust's 2025 Identity Fraud Report, deepfake fraud attempts occurred at a rate of roughly 1 every 5 minutes in 2024.

Doyle, an adult and political content creator, says she’s had websites leak her OnlyFans content and have used AI to change her into a blonde white woman. In an Instagram Reel with 2 million views posted on July 26, she shows her video and the deepfaked content back to back. The deepfaked video uses her voice, her body and video. Doyle says other content often contains her OnlyFans watermark on the bottom, but she still struggles to get it taken down, as it is often uploaded overseas on Russian servers.

“As a sex worker, I know I’ve already signed up to sell videos and photos of myself in certain ways. But that is the way that I choose to take that photo,” Doyle says. She believes it goes beyond just an “attack on sex workers.” This type of abuse can happen to anyone, including minors, but women account for 90% of victims of the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery.

“This is an attack on women,” she says. “Anybody can just take any video and turn it into anything they want. That itself is so sickening. That itself is just deeply violating.”

Doyle has had individuals following her imposter accounts, building "relationships" with her impersonators and not realizing they have never actually spoken to her.

"If there's someone else out there making completely fake content of me (with) fans thinking they are talking to me, thinking they're gonna get married to me, and they see me in person and I ignore them ... there are people out there that are gonna snap and it puts me in a dangerous position where I could be hurt or killed," she says.

Jaimie Smiles, another OnlyFans creator with 4.1 million total followers across platforms, has been in the adult content industry for five years and first noticed fake accounts about a month in. She’s seen AI-altered images that have swapped out her face and made her look older or skinnier, but she always recognizes the photo.

“It’s my body,” she says. “I know the background, the outfit I’m wearing. It’s very weird, very frustrating.” Smiles, Campbell and St. James all watch out for each other, she adds, often flagging fake or stolen content they come across online.

Scammers will prompt Smiles' fans to participate in conversations on “messaging apps she’s never even heard of,” pretending that Smiles’ daughter is sick in the hospital.

“I wouldn’t tell anybody any of that stuff about my family. The stuff these people say and then the fans are believing it, it is crazy,” she says. “I've definitely had people come back mad at me,: ‘Why'd you ask me to send all that money and then you disappeared?’ And I’m like, ‘No, you’re clearly talking to a fake.’”

Doyle understands that as a sex worker, she "signed up" to publish sexualized photos and videos and take on the risks that come with doing so. "But I didn't sign up for this," she says.

According to Campbell, their line of work is “all about consent.” There is paperwork, conversations and boundary-setting while filming content. Scam accounts have taking images on Instagram where she's fully clothed and used apps to remove her clothing and put "fake private parts" on her body.

“When I post something on the internet, I'm giving consent to post that,” Campbell says. “I didn't consent for them to remove my bathing suit on a picture. That’s where I feel violated. Yeah, I have nudity on the internet. I do (porn). But this is my body."

“And obviously, I’m doing these things for profit,” she adds. “That’s money out of my pocket that people are seeing for free instead of purchasing from me.”

Smiles has a disclaimer on her site: “‼️BEWARE OF SCAMMERS ‼️ If you think you are chatting with me, you are being fooled.”

The only way to chat with Smiles is through her fan pages. But by 9 a.m. on the day of our conversation, she had already found an X account using her content to message her fans.

When she first became aware of these issues, she signed up for a takedown service that cost $45 per month, but it wasn't enough. She now spends $150 monthly to work with Reba Rocket, the co-CEO of Takedown Piracy alongside her husband, Nate Glass. Smiles had already forwarded the X account to Rocket, who was ready to send a copyright takedown notice.

St. James says she's "spent thousands" over her career to have scammers taken down. "I care about my fans. I care about my followers," she says. "I care when I hear them say, ‘I wish we could still talk on WhatsApp,' and I'm like, 'Please, I'm not there.’"

Takedown Piracy has removed close to 400 million infringements in total, according to Rocket. Their roster includes OnlyFans stars with millions of followers as well as "creators that just opened an account yesterday," she says.

Rocket says she's seen every iteration of piracy as it's evolved over her 18-year career in the takedown space, but AI has added a "new twist to the detection and removal" without precedents in place to outline responses.

"Any time a pirate can figure out a way to utilize somebody's content to make money without having done all the work ... they're going to do it," she explains. "What feels different to me about this is (AI) makes it so much easier for them to very quickly spit out enormous amounts of content."

Bad actors once had to rely on Photoshop skills to alter someone's image. Now, they produce "40 different images with different-colored bikinis with one click," Rocket says. She adds that being able to register a trademark on adult content creators' names would help protect fans and creators alike from these scams, along with stronger international laws for taking down content on foreign servers.

But at the end of the day, Campbell says it's just the way the business goes.

"Is it fair? It's not fair for other people to be making money off of our images," she says. "But it's a battle that we've been fighting and it's a battle that we're gonna continue to have to fight. We just have to hope that our defense systems, like our DMCA companies, advance with the technology to continue to protect us.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: OnlyFans stars' images are being used to scam fans. It's putting them in danger