AdminLeo: OnlyFans Owner’s Dubious Financial History

The first digital trace of Leo Radvinsky dates back to 1997 when Radvinsky, then just 15-years-old, acted as a webmaster for an online science fiction strategy game called X-COM: Apocalypse, where players fend off attacking aliens invading from space.

During the ensuing 23 years, Radvinsky built an online operation of pornography worth well over $1 billion. But despite his extensive business interests, including full ownership of the sex worker-driven, pop-culture sensation OnlyFans, extremely little is publicly known about Radvinsky. Just a handful of photos of him have ever surfaced and one is hard-pressed to find a single quote attributed to one of the wealthiest men in the U.S.

Today, Radvinsky is worth approximately $1.7 billion. He owns a mansion in Florida, penthouses in Chicago, farmland in rural Illinois, a yacht named “Black Sea,” millions in NFTs, and has in recent months been accused of bribing senior officials at Meta (formerly Facebook) to blacklist his business rivals.

For over a year, Forensic News has spoken to Radvinsky’s current and former business associates, family friends, employees, business competitors, private investigators, and reviewed hundreds of pages of court, corporate, banking, real estate, and web domain records to paint a portrait of a teen computer whiz who quietly became the billionaire mogul of online porn.

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When Radvinsky was a child, his family emigrated from Ukraine to a suburb outside of Chicago. His father, Savely Radvinsky, was well-off himself, though the source of that wealth remains a mystery even for those who know him well.

Two sources who had business relationships with Savely Radvinsky and spoke with Forensic News under condition of anonymity to more freely discuss the situation said that there were rumblings that Radvinsky had powerful connections in Odessa, Ukraine in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Rumor has it that his initial capital is somewhat from shady schemes back in the early 90s,” one of the sources told Forensic News. “Doing business in the post-USSR Ukraine was all about hat-trick magic.”

In the public domain, Savely Radvinsky has an array of business forays. His main business for many years appears to have been a pet food supply company, though one of his profiles on an investing message board shows him discussing oil and bitcoin.

“Do not bet against Putin,” he wrote in 2017, “oil is going up.”

After moving to the U.S., the elder Radvinsky and his wife Anna began buying and selling real estate in Illinois. Records show that the family had properties in five states at one point, including California and Connecticut.

Many of the details about Savely Radvinsky were first reported by Russian investigative journalist Kirill Rukov for Baza.

Leo Radvinsky’s first business venture began before he graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in economics at Northwestern University in 2002.

Cybertania Inc. was registered in Illinois to a suburb outside of Chicago. But perhaps because he was still just 17, and firmly still in his duties as webmaster for X-COM: Apocalypse, Leo Radvinsky did not appear on the corporate paperwork. Instead, his mother Anna acted as the company’s registered agent.

 

The nature of Cybertania’s business can best be described as dubious at best.

The company immediately began purchasing domain names related to pornography. Records show that hundreds of domain names were registered to the family’s home over the course of more than 15 years.

According to Forbes, some websites registered by Radvinsky in the late 1990s and early 2000s included references to “hacked passwords” to access alleged underage sexual activities. As Forbes explained, there is no evidence that any illegal activities took place. Instead, it was a ploy used by Radvinsky to earn affiliate money by sending as much traffic to other porn websites as possible.

Domain records reviewed by Forensic News, show that Radvinsky held the domain names, “websyoungest[dot]com” and “slaveboywanted[dot]com”, until 2014. It is uncertain what kind of content, if any, those domains hosted.

By catering to pedophiles to make a buck, the websites purporting to offer access to child pornography were the first indication that Leo Radvinsky was willing to cross boundaries to pursue wealth. Forbes quoted a lawsuit discovery motion to report that just one of Radvinsky’s “password” websites was generating $5,000 in revenue daily.

During the mid-2000s, Radvinsky was hit with multiple lawsuits from Microsoft and Amazon among other private companies alleging swaths of wrongdoing from spamming to impersonating the large companies in official-looking emails to direct traffic to his pornography ventures. All cases were settled outside of court for undisclosed sums of money.

One industry source who was involved in litigation with Radvinsky told Forensic News that it was common knowledge among the industry that Radvinsky began his career as a hacker, making money off his computer brilliance. Radvinsky was never sued for hacking (a term that was still a new concept in the early-mid Aughts) and has never faced any criminal charges.

After clearing the legal hurdles, Radvinsky launched what would be his most successful project for more than a decade: MyFreeCams, a live webcamming site where models strip, engage in sexual acts, and give private shows to people who use purchase MyFreeCams tokens.

Radvinsky became a multi-millionaire because of the explosion of success that MyFreeCams saw in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

As a company, MyFreeCams was churning hundreds of millions of dollars in payments annually and Google Trends shows that search interest in the cam-platform grew year-over-year.

Even with all of his business success, however, few knew the man behind the online pornography boom. To the thousands of models and millions of users on his platform, he was simply AdminLeo.

When MyFreeCams was nominated for three industry awards in 2011, Radvinsky used only his first name in an interview. “We are honored to receive so many nominations,” said RadivinskyLeo.

“What does admin leo look like?” posited one poster on an adult webcam chat forum in 2013. “I saw him once, briefly, from a quarter-mile away,” one commenter dryly replied, “I was blinded for three days. Totally worth it.”

To those who did know him, Radvinsky was a socially awkward, yet affable character who wore sunglasses indoors and asked for his photo to not be taken. In one incident in 2011, MyFreeCams banned a user for posting an image of Radvinsky in a chat room.

Around that time, MyFreeCams struck an advertising deal with Chat Avenue, one of the earliest and most visited hosts for various themed chat rooms that originated in the 1990s, according to archived screenshots and a source familiar with the deal.

The archived versions of some of the chat rooms show that MyFreeCams advertised its adult camming content to “boys,” “girls,” and “teens,” where the loosely-policed age requirement was just 13. In reality, anyone could join the chat rooms by simply entering a username.

“Hey Guys! It’s FREE to use: Go to MyFreeCams, the #1 adult webcam community!

You can watch hundreds of girls on webcam and video chat with them for FREE,” one of the ads read just above the “boys” chat room.

 

The MyFreeCams-Chat Avenue relationship was first analyzed in a report by 4W.

Federal court documents and news reports indicate that during the years that MyFreeCams advertised on Chat Avenue and continuing until the present, multiple predators have been arrested in relation to child sex crimes committed on Chat Avenue.

In one high-profile case, Raymond Liddy, a former Deputy Attorney General, was charged with possession of child pornography. During an interview with the FBI, Liddy stated that he was “sure” that he came across pictures of underage victims because others on Chat Avenue posted them.

“that Chat Avenue thing… [P]eople put them on there,” Liddy said. 

MyFreeCams ran ads on every chat room on Chat Avenue, except the “kids” chat, for about a decade, and spent a substantial amount of money to maintain that ad network, according to a source familiar with one of the company’s financials. The agreement between Chat Avenue and MyFreeCams also drove scores of traffic to the camming platform.

Efforts to identify the owner of Chat Avenue were unsuccessful. Domain registration information changed regularly and privacy policies and terms of condition did not include any corporate identification. A traffic analysis of Chat Avenue shows that the website still receives millions of visits monthly.

Law Enforcement Scrutiny

For at least 13 years, law enforcement and regulatory agencies have had an eye on Radvinsky’s business empire amid underlying reports of systemic wage theft, worker exploitation, and potential underage activity. But no action has been taken.

In 2009, one of the first of what would be many Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) were filed by a banking institution concerned that Radvinsky’s businesses may be laundering money.

SARs are not proof of any illegality and banks are required to report suspicious activity to enforcement authorities. Neither Radvinsky nor any of his companies have been accused of wrongdoing.

The banking documents can, however, illuminate business practices that are of public interest.

In the 2009 report filed by Bank of America against MFCXY Inc, the holding company for MyFreeCams, and three other businesses owned by Radvinsky, the bank describes “unusual wire activity and payment layering.” Layering is one of the three steps in the money laundering process in which people or companies try to disguise the true source or purpose of funds.

 

MyFreeCams, as Bank of America wrote in the above SAR, sent millions of dollars to an off-shore payment processor located in Curacao, which then appears to have paid the models on the website. The bank investigator stated that the high dollar amounts being sent offshore to the payment processor did not include details to differentiate the transactions. “Pattern is consistent with payment layering,” they wrote.

The report also revealed that MyFreeCams sent $22,000 to the Nevada Brothel Association, a Political Action Committee made up of brothel owners across the state.

Over the next decade, numerous banks filed SARs on Radvinsky’s companies, totaling well over $1 billion. Report after report filed by different banks in the U.S. found the same suspicious activity: indicators of layering and the use of off-shore payment processors.

The reports appear to have garnered the attention of law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions.

In 2012, Romania’s anti-money laundering law enforcement agency requested MyFreeCams banking records from the U.S. Treasury Department, according to a note filed by one of the banks. Romanian authorities did not respond to a request for comment and it is unclear what became of their investigation into MyFreeCams.

 

Months later, alleged law enforcement scrutiny hit closer to home. A SAR filed by the Bank of New York Mellon stated that it “received a government inquiry seeking information” on Radvinsky, his girlfriend Yekaterina (Kate) Chudnovsky, his mother, businesses under his control, and other businesses in the adult entertainment industry.

The Bank of New York Mellon then conducted a review and located 184 bank wires that they labeled suspicious.

As the apparent law enforcement investigations unfolded, banks from across the country continued filing their SARs.

A 2016 investigation by JP Morgan Chase found that a bank account for MyFreeCams at Wells Fargo received over $87 million in an 11-month period from a bank account for MyFreeCams at Chase for no stated purpose, adding a layer in the payment process that may not have been needed.

“The wires range from $400.000.00 to $400.000.10,” the bank analyst wrote. “The payments generally started at $400.000.01. and then each subsequent wire added one cent ($400,000.02. $400,000.03….). ending at $400.000.09. The payment would then restart at $400.000.01 and again increase one cent for each payment.”

Likely unbeknownst to JP Morgan Chase, the Wells Fargo investigative team had already flagged the same account held by MyFreeCams a year prior, citing yet more indications of layering. Like the JP Morgan Chase SAR, the Wells Fargo report stated that funds were transferred between accounts controlled by Radvinsky at different banks in the U.S. before being sent to off-shore payment processors and banks.

The bank also highlighted payments that increased by one penny to other third parties, including payment processors. The bank investigator wrote that MyFreeCams sent 35 wires totaling $6.2M to a bank in Germany for the benefit of Choice Bank in Belize. This dizzying international flow of money left the bank to conclude that “the outgoing wire transfers…appear suspicious and are indicative of layering.”

Former MyFreeCams models who spoke with Forensic News confirmed that Choice Bank prepaid cards were an option for payment. But when Choice Bank collapsed in 2018, many models lost their wages.

Wage complaints were not new to MyFreeCams. Forensic News spoke with 5 former models, all of whom requested anonymity either for fear of reprisal or negative career consequences, said that MyFreeCams shut down their accounts randomly, and, in some cases, without explanation.

“It seemed completely arbitrary,” one of the former models said. “I didn’t receive any explanation from MFC or any of the admins and I know other girls who experienced the same thing.”

At MyFreeCams events and conventions, Radvinsky was frequently seen with his close friend Alex Goykhman.

 

According to two people who were present for close-knit convention afterparties thrown by Goykhman and Radvinsky, including one who spoke to Forensic News last year, cocaine was plentiful.

Goykhman didn’t just serve as a friend to Radvinsky, he was also involved in the business operations of MyFreeCams and, later, OnlyFans.

A successful photographer by trade, Goykhman became increasingly involved in the business affairs of MyFreeCams as its success peaked in the mid-2010s. Goykhman organized popular MyFreeCams events where celebrities and webcam models alike partied.

 

Behind the scenes, Goykhman appears to have used his own Illinois company, Goyk Productions Inc, to mass import sex toys and women’s items from China.

Though it states that it is a digital marketing company, shipping records reviewed by Forensic News indicate that Goyk Productions spent over $200,000 to import clothing, sex toys, shot glasses, LED lights, bags, and other items mainly from China. At least some of the shipping records indicate that MyFreeCams was the ultimate customer.

 

Goykhman did not respond to a request to explain why his digital marketing company was importing women’s items.

Radvinsky’s multi-million dollar purchases

During the MyFreeCams boom in the late Aughts spilling into the next decade, Radvinsky spent at least $19 million on real estate in Illinois.

Cook County property deeds show that Radvinsky purchased a penthouse every other year from 2008-2016, four of the five apartments located on the same floor of a skyscraper in downtown Chicago. In total, Radvinsky spent over $9.2 million on the units.

Forensic News gained legal access to one of the penthouses and documented the space in a journalistic effort to understand the scope of Radvinsky’s luxury purchases.

To enter Radvinsky’s penthouse on the 81st floor of the Aqua in Chicago is to enter a world of luxury. Walking down the hallway leading to the expansive living and kitchen area, one is flanked by an atlas of Europe and a plaque showcasing a photo of the then-five living Presidents — Carter, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama. All five have purportedly signed the showcase.

 

The walls throughout the penthouse are adorned with expensive paintings of nature scenes and antiques, including numerous fish (Radvinsky has a commercial fishing license in Florida) which sit atop tables and shelves.

Perched some 800 feet above Chicago is Radvinsky’s office space inside unit 8106 (he owns unit 8105 as well, two of just four units on the floor, and unit 8002, a floor below).

 

With an endless view over Lake Michigan and a 22-inch wraparound monitor, Radvinsky appears to have at least partially operated his online pornography empire here, placing his mouse atop an alien mousepad, a small reminder of his meteoric rise from X-COM: Apocalypse.

 

Some 60 miles from Radvinsky’s high-class residences is the rural farm county of Kankakee, Illinois, where Radvinsky is also heavily invested.

Records there show that Radvinsky has acquired hundreds of acres of farmland purchased in the same general time frame as the penthouses. In this county, Radvinsky has spent at least another $9 million.

 

Radvinsky also purchased a 50ft Sport Coupe Yacht and, paying homage to his homeland of Odessa, Ukraine, aptly named the craft “Black Sea.”

OnlyFans

By 2018, MyFreeCams was nearing a 75% decline in search interest, according to Google Trends, and Radvinsky was looking to improve his business standing.

He sent a cold email to Tim Stokely, a British businessman and the son of a banker in London. Stokely was the CEO of a little-known but regionally successful company called OnlyFans. Corporate records from 2018 show that Fenix International Limited, the holding company that operates OnlyFans, had approximately $2 million in assets by the end of 2018.

At its core, OnlyFans was a subscription platform that allows “Fans” to subscribe to creators, not dissimilar to Patreon or Substack. The company took 20% of a creator’s earnings monthly, which made it competitive with rivals.

Radvinsky propositioned Stokely in the email to buy OnlyFans outright. In October 2018, Radvinsky acquired 100% of Fenix International Limited from Stokely’s father Guy and mother Deborah, who officially held the shares in the company. Radvinsky, according to an industry source, paid approximately $30 million and Stokely stayed on as CEO.

 

Radvinsky soon transformed OnlyFans into a platform for sex workers. The 80% take-home rate for sex workers was far greater than competitors, including Radvinsky’s own MyFreeCams, where models only earn 50-63% of money spent.

By the beginning of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, OnlyFans corporate records show that assets increased healthily as OnlyFans attracted over 7 million creators. Radvinsky once again had an X-rated cash cow that would soon explode.

As lockdowns were implemented in 2020 and billions of people were forced inside and online, some looking for ways to supplement their income, OnlyFans became one of the most stunningly successful tech companies in history.

The number of creators was at least doubling month over month, and for every creator, an average of 20 Fans were signing up. Though the website attracted non-sexual creators including artists and journalists, an insider source told Forensic News that pornography makes up well over 90% of the content.

In April 2020, Beyoncé name-dropped OnlyFans in a song with Megan Thee Stallion, cementing its name in the history of peak pop culture celebrity.

“On that Demon Time, she might start a OnlyFans (OnlyFans)

Big B and that B stand for bands”

Celebrities began to flock to the platform, leading to major headlines associating fame and wealth with OnlyFans. Cardi B, Aaron Carter, Tyga, Austin Mahone, Blac Chyna, and even Bhad Bhabie, the infamous Dr. Phil “catch me outside” guest-turned-rapper, created accounts and attracted thousands of paying fans.

The pop-culture frenzy surrounding OnlyFans rapidly made Radvinsky a billionaire. Where there were hurdles for the company, such as Instagram not allowing links to OnlyFans in profiles, Radvinsky had a solution.

Just before his purchase of OnlyFans, Radvinsky, according to sources familiar with his financial dealings and business records from Delaware and Illinois, founded and began running AllMyLinks, a service that allows content creators to create a single landing page with different links to all of their content on the web.

The exclusively obtained documents from Delaware show that Radvinsky’s listed patent attorney for multiple Cybertania ventures, Myrna Goldberg, incorporated AllMyLinks LLC and Fenix Internet, an OnlyFans subsidiary.

Additionally, the Chicago address listed for the AllMyLinks trademark corresponds to the same location of Fenix Internet. Ventures connected to Goykhman are also registered here.

The creation of AllMyLinks allowed Radvinsky to capture traffic for OnlyFans that was previously difficult to acquire. Instagram users who had OnlyFans accounts could now add a link to their AllMyLinks page on their profile.

Soon, OnlyFans.com became one of the most visited websites in the world, garnering hundreds of millions of visits monthly.

Business documents filed in the United Kingdom illuminate the enormous financial gains. At the end of November 2020, OnlyFans reported over $2 billion in transactions processed, resulting in approximately $338 million in revenue.

 

The documents also show that OnlyFans acquired a nearly-irrelevant company called Delivery Code, which lets people purchase gifts for sex workers and others whose addresses are kept confidential. The company had about $5,000 in cash at the bank and zero employees, but OnlyFans purchased Delivery Code for nearly $29 million.

What little business Delivery Code did, it was fraught with allegations of fraud. Multiple users of Delivery Code told Forensic News they simply never received their gifts after fans purchased them and the customer service seemed non-existent. Others said that they ended up receiving Amazon gift cards in lieu of the gifts months later. Public reviews of the company support these claims.

In one incident in 2021, the official support account for OnlyFans messaged a user on Twitter who complained publicly about Delivery Code. The OnlyFans account denied that the two companies were related, even though it purchased Delivery Code less than a year prior.

“[W]e have nothing to do with the company you are referring to,” they said.

One look at the shareholders of Delivery Code might shine some light on the ostensibly strange business decision: Thomas Stokely, OnlyFans COO, and his father Guy, OnlyFans Head of Finance. Because the multimillion-dollar windfall came in the form of corporate gains and not salary, the Stokelys likely saved millions of dollars in taxes.

Radvinsky, the sole owner of OnlyFans, took a $23.8 million dividend.

 

More headlines, especially from London tabloids, regularly drew attention to creators who made gobsmacking amounts of money on the sex-worker-driven platform. When the business of OnlyFans was raised in articles, Stokely was often the one who answered the questions and held the spotlight. Radvinsky avoided a mention.

According to sources familiar with the situation, OnlyFans also signed a large marketing deal with Goyk Productions, the company run by Radvinsky’s close friend, Alex Goykhman. Goykhman has alternatively listed himself on LinkedIn as the Head of U.S. Operations at OnlyFans and the Head of Marketing.

Two former employees of one of the businesses told Forensic News that Non-Disclosure Agreements were signed regarding the exact nature of the business relationship between OnlyFans and Goyk Productions.

Job postings and profiles for former employees, however, indicate that Goyk Productions was involved with digital productions for OFTV, OnlyFans’ streaming platform that does not allow nudity. One posting seeking Human Resources help says that the position is for Goyk Production’s “client” OnlyFans.

One of the former employees also said that company employees were instructed via email to not speak to the press, specifically about the OnlyFans-Goyk Productions relationship. Goyk Productions didn’t respond to an email seeking comment for this article.

Underneath the hood of OnlyFans’ chart-topping popularity, the reality for numerous sex workers was much grimmer.

Over the course of 18 months, Forensic News has spoken with at least six dozen OnlyFans sex workers who have alleged wage theft. Some of these discussions formed the basis of two previous articles on OnlyFans and Radvinsky.

Anna Valdez, a former creator on OnlyFans said she woke up one day in 2021 to find her account email address changed and the pending balance in her account — $7,000 — withdrawn to an unknown bank. Screenshots provided to Forensic News confirmed Valdez’s story and showed that whoever changed her details used an email address with a disposable domain name.

 

In discussions with customer service about the unauthorized access to her funds, Valdez was largely blamed for the intrusion. One email from OnlyFans’ support stated that “content creators are responsible for keeping their access information safe.”

 

“I trusted this company,” Valdez said. “When $7000 was taken from my account, which is such a large amount, and I reached out for help they literally said ‘sorry we can’t help you with that you’re responsible for your account.’”

“That just leads me to believe that they are the ones who took the money out of my account and committed fraud,” she stated.

More common than Valdez’s story is a more simplistic allegation of wage theft. Many of the creators who have spoken with Forensic News claimed that their accounts were arbitrarily closed with wages still in their pending balance. The complaints mirrored those of the MyFreeCams models who faced similar situations years prior.

Claudia, who lives in Spain, logged into her account to the message, “please contact support to resume payments.”

After emailing support, Claudia was told, as the other workers were, that her account was erased.

“Accounts are typically being deleted due to suspicious/fraudulent activity,” the company wrote, with no specific identifying information about the nature of the issue. This exact phraseology was used in at least 8 different cases reviewed by Forensic News.

 

After that, the company stopped replying.

As with Delivery Code, public reviews of OnlyFans have been generally terrible, with many echoing the stories of Valdez, Claudia, and other sex workers who have alleged fraud or theft.

“What is most concerning is that my profile is up and still generating THEM money,” Maria, a former model from Chile whose account was deleted told me. “People still subscribing and watching me naked but I can’t ask for it to be deleted nor access to my own content and I’m not getting paid for it. I feel very exploited honestly.” 

In 2021, Radvinsky explored multiple options to sell at least part of his OnlyFans ownership.

According to Bloomberg, OnlyFans sought outside investors at a rate that valued the company north of $1 billion. Axios later confirmed that Radvinsky was attempting to sell some of his shares in the company and said that an OnlyFans pitch deck to potential investors projected $2.5 billion in revenue in 2022.

Two sources familiar with OnlyFans’ business operations largely confirmed the reporting with one adding, “it’s clear that Leo wants to cash out.” That source also said that Radvinsky and Stokely considered listing OnlyFans publicly either in the U.S. or in the UK.

Radvinsky had trouble finding investors, though, according to Axios and others. Investors reportedly stayed away because of OnlyFans’ reputation for pornography, but talks with at least one unnamed investor reached the due diligence stage, according to one source, before the Venture Capitalist firm passed.

“OnlyFans is one of the creator economy’s largest and most successful platforms,” the Axios report concluded. “And investors are content to watch its success from afar.”

In the midst of looking for outside funding to cash out Radvinsky, OnlyFans shocked creators, Fans, and observers alike when, on August 19, 2021, the platform announced that it would ban explicit content in six weeks. “These changes are to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers,” OnlyFans said in a statement.

The truth, however, was a little more mixed.

Banks and some credit card companies were indeed putting pressure on OnlyFans to tighten its security, content moderation, and anti-CSAM (Child Sex Abuse Material) efforts.

On the very day that OnlyFans announced the porn ban, the BBC released an investigation into the company’s handling of illegal videos on the site. Based on leaked documents from inside the company and interviews with multiple OnlyFans moderators, the BBC found that moderators are given leeway in how they treat illegal content. One document obtained by the BBC described, in part, that creators on OnlyFans with a large following should be given more warnings than those with low follower county.

“[St]taff are told to moderate accounts with low user numbers ‘as we would and [restrict] when necessary’. With middle range accounts, they are told to warn, ‘but only restrict after the 3rd warning’. If one of the site’s most successful – and lucrative – creators breaks the rules, the account is dealt with by a different team.”

Dozens of accounts that look to be created by children are taken down by OnlyFans daily, the report added, citing a former moderator.

The announced porn ban came also at a time when Radvinsky was looking to make the platform look as palatable as possible to investors. Google search interest for the site was plateauing, and investigators, including the FBI, were beginning to ask questions about OnlyFans’ finances.

According to two former OnlyFans creators who had alleged that they had their accounts hacked, FBI agents asked detailed questions in 2020 about not only the intrusion into their accounts but also the draining of funds. One of the former creators was also asked about their banking statements and, specifically, the “coding” on their payments from OnlyFans.

Merchant Category Codes (MCC) are four-digit codes that credit card companies use to categorize the nature of business conducted by their consumer customers. These codes are published publicly.

Payment processors that accept MCC’s in the adult entertainment industry generally charge much more for their services than mainstream processors like Stripe or PayPal because of the high-risk nature of the industry. One such processor for multiple x-rated websites includes CCBill, which charges between 10-15% for each transaction.

OnlyFans, however, has been able to maintain a processing relationship with Stripe and other processors that charge 2.9%, even though the vast majority of its business involves explicit content which is prohibited by Stripe.

One way it might have kept these relationships with the processors that charge much lower rates is the miscoding of MCC’s for some OnlyFans creators. Bank wires to two former adult content creators that earned five-digit incomes monthly on OnlyFans were reviewed by Forensic News.

In one case, the payments from Fenix Internet LLC were given the MCC of 5815 which corresponds to “Digital Goods—Audiovisual Media Including Books, Movies, and Music,” not adult entertainment. The other explicit content creator on OnlyFans was paid under the MCC 7392, the code for consulting and public relations.

The act of purposefully changing the MCC for financial gain can amount to bank fraud, but there is too little information to conclude that OnlyFans committed any wrongdoing. The status of an FBI investigation is unclear, and they declined to comment.

In the days that followed OnlyFans’ announcement to ban explicit content, creators expressed their outrage, calling it a betrayal. Privately, though, OnlyFans was assuring some top creators that the ban on explicit content was not going to happen. Forensic News reviewed multiple messages from OnlyFans timestamped after the announced porn ban that assured some creators that “there are no plans on implementing such changes.”

Just six days after the ban was announced, OnlyFans reversed its official position, saying it would continue allowing pornography after “receiving assurances” from banking partners. Whatever the reason for the ban and surprising reversal, the once-plateauing search traffic for OnlyFans spiked to record levels in that chaotic week in August.

In December 2021, Stokely unexpectedly resigned as OnlyFans CEO. The company replaced him with Ami Gan, its former chief spokesperson.

Today, OnlyFans is the 102nd most visited website in the United States.

Facebook bribery allegations and offshore banking

In addition to the complaints of wage theft across both of his major platforms, Radvinsky’s banking practices with OnlyFans have also mirrored MyFreeCams. A Metrobank database lists Fenix Internet LLC, the OnlyFans subsidiary, as among the companies that opened an account in the Philippines in 2020. Two sources familiar with OnlyFans financials also said that the company has multiple offshore accounts, most prominently in Asia.

In a series of articles in February 2022, the BBC reported that a lawsuit had been filed in Florida accusing OnlyFans of paying bribes to Meta (formerly Facebook) to blacklist users who promoted rival websites of OnlyFans.

The explosive lawsuit, filed by FanCentro, “claims that social media content of adult performers promoting rival websites to OnlyFans was placed on a database of extremist material shared between tech companies that is run by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT),” according to the BBC.

The lawsuit, uploaded in full below, accuses Fenix Internet LLC and Radvinsky of routing funds through Hong Kong to officers of an unnamed social media company (multiple other related class-action lawsuits filed in California on behalf of adult entertainers, their union, and business competitors named the company as Meta).

Those payments, according to the lawsuits, were secretly made to Meta executives to manipulate the database of extremist material to include OnlyFans competitors, effectively knee-capping their businesses.

The lawsuits alleged that OnlyFans “maintains” a “secret” Hong Kong company also named Fenix International Limited.

“One of Radvinsky’s wholly-owned companies, Fenix International Limited (which directly operates OnlyFans), also maintains a secret entity- non-party Fenix International Limited

Hong Kong. — that is not advertised disclosed anywhere on the OnlyFans.com website,” lawyers for FanCentro wrote.

FanCentro and the class action participants in California highlight another company in Hong Kong called Smart Team International Business which appears to be in the industry of forming and accounting for offshore companies.

“Smart Team International Business Limited Hong Kong served as Secretary to Fenix International Limited Hong Kong in early 2019…” the suit claims, “Therefore, on information and belief, Radvinsky could have used either Smart Team International Business Limited Hong Kong or Fenix International Hong Kong to make the scheme-facilitating payments,” 

The allegations largely comport with information that was shared with Forensic News in early 2022 by a source familiar with the situation. The source, who asked for anonymity to protect their safety, told Forensic News that they have seen bank wires from Fenix International Limited to Smart Team International which then paid offshore trust accounts set up in the Philippines by “senior Facebook executives.” Forensic News could not independently confirm the allegations, and Meta and OnlyFans have denied any wrongdoing.

Records reviewed by Forensic News can corroborate the claim that Smart Team International Business acted as a Secretary for Fenix International Limited in Hong Kong, but the shareholder for the company appears to be a man in China. There was no independent confirmation of any payments to Meta or its officers.

On its website, Smart Team describes itself as a “professional services” company that provides offshore company formation and banking, accounting, and secretarial services for over 60,000 companies worldwide.

A Meta spokesperson told the BBC “these allegations are without merit and we will address them in the context of the litigation as needed.” Similarly, OnlyFans denied the claims as having “no merit”. 

Smart Team, Meta, OnlyFans, Goykhman, and Radvinsky all did not reply to detailed questions sent by Forensic News.

Radvinsky becomes NFT whale, moves operations to Florida

In 2020, Radvinsky relocated from Illinois to Boca Raton, Florida after purchasing a 12,000+ square-foot mansion for just under $4 million. Months after purchasing the sprawling property with a 9.5 car garage and three-hole golf course, Radvinsky also moved many of his business ventures from Illinois to Florida.

 

Radvinsky has also heavily invested in open-source software. One former contractor who worked on one of Radvinsky’s open-source projects told Forensic News he was paid via one of Radvinsky’s companies called “Livechat.com Inc.” A representative for Livechat.com said that they “have no connections to “Livechat.Com Inc.”

Throughout his career, Radvinsky has continued to purchase expensive domain names. LR.com and Leo.com host different biographical websites for Radvinsky, while Stars.com is listed for $5.9 million after Radvinsky purchased it for under $1 million in 2019.

Forensic News has also identified Radvinsky as the owner of multiple Non-Fungible Token (NFT) wallets in the cryptocurrency space. His main wallet under the name “leorad.eth” has transacted over 3,689 Ethereum (ETH), worth approximately $10.7 million, in just the space of one year.

The moniker “leorad” was first found to be a nickname used by Radvinsky on a publicly accessible background check. The leorath.eth wallet also appears to have sent an NFT to a different wallet named “kevinday.eth”. Kevin Day is the current President of Your.org Inc, an domain hosting company that was previously registered and managed by Radvinsky. As of 2018, the two were listed in domain registry information as points of contact for Your.org.

 

On his personal website, Radvinsky lists Give Ethereum, an initiative to utilize Ethereum to give to charity, as an entity in which he is involved in the development. The owner of leorad.eth also registered giveethereum.eth, providing another real-world connection to prove that Radvinsky is indeed behind leorad.eth.

Blockchain transactions show that Radvinsky has purchased or minted over 600 NFTs, in a process that a leading cryptocurrency analysis company told Forensic News looks partially automated.

“This is a very active NFT buyer that we believe may have his strategy automated because there are many different NFTs bought in rapid succession,” Maddie Kennedy, communications director for Chainalysis told Forensic News. “The transfer between accounts for free indicates that this account may also own the other accounts.”

Chainalysis also confirmed that the transaction with Kevin Day involved Radvinsky minting an NFT for $65,000 worth of Ethereum and then transferring it to Day for free.

In one of his highest-profile moves in the cryptocurrency space, Radvinsky was the top bidder supporting a documentary about the rise of Ethereum, spending more than $260,000 worth of Ethereum to land the title Executive Producer.

Radvinsky’s NFT purchases range from some of the rarest pieces of web3 design, from a highly coveted CryptoPunk that Radvinsky purchased for nearly $400,000 and a Bored Ape Yacht Club ape for $175,000, to a piece of abstract art acquired for $337,000.

In late February 2022, as Russia’s war against Ukraine raged, OnlyFans donated 500ETH ($1.3 million) to a group set-up to raise funds for Ukrainian victims of the war. Radvinsky himself placed a bid of 1,050ETH (or about $2.75 million) on an NFT being sold to raise funds. Just 12 minutes later, however, he was outbid, and less than 20 minutes after that, Radvinsky transferred 1,000ETH ($2.6 million) to a new wallet. The new wallet, according to blockchain records, immediately sent 999.99ETH to Coinbase, where it could be withdrawn.

But, even within his NFT wallet deep in his digital ecosystem, Radvinsky keeps a reminder of his early days with a pixelated rendition of an alien. Strikingly similar to the little green men in X-COM: Apocalypse.