- Fenix International Limited failed to provide Ofcom with accurate information about its age assurance measures on OnlyFans
Ofcom has today fined the provider of OnlyFans, Fenix International Limited, £1.05 million 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 our job as a regulator. Firms are required, by law, to respond to all statutory information requests from Ofcom in an accurate, complete and timely way.
In this case, in June 2022 and June 2023, Ofcom sought information from Fenix 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.
Response from Fenix
As part of its submission, Fenix stated that it had 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.[1]
Identifying and reporting an error
On 4 January 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 1 November 2021. After learning this, Fenix elected to raise the challenge age to 23 on 16 January 2025, but then changed it again to 21 years old on 19 January 2025. Fenix only first informed Ofcom about the error on 22 January 2024.
Given this disclosure and following engagement with the company to clarify the impact of the potential breach, Ofcom launched an investigation on 1 May 2024 to review whether Fenix had failed to comply with its duties to provide complete and accurate information to the regulator.
What our investigation found
Taking all the evidence into account, our investigation concluded that Fenix contravened its duties to provide accurate and complete information to Ofcom 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.
Our 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. We believe robust fact checking processes would have resulted in the incorrect submission coming to light sooner.
Financial penalty
As a result of these failings, Ofcom has imposed a financial penalty on Fenix of £1.05 million, which will be passed on to HM Treasury. This includes a 30% reduction from the penalty we would otherwise have imposed, as a result of resource savings achieved through Fenix accepting our findings and settling the case.
We consider the penalty is appropriate and proportionate to the contravention, in light of the following considerations:
- Fenix is a large, well-resourced company, which is well aware of its regulatory obligations. As such, it should have taken steps to ensure the data supplied was properly reviewed and verified through appropriate governance channels before being submitted to Ofcom.
- The data inaccuracy undermined our ability to carry out our regulatory function, given it led to inaccurate data being published by Ofcom. It also caused us additional work to issue a note of correction for the error.
- After Fenix identified the error, it took over two weeks for the company to report the issue to Ofcom. While we acknowledge that Fenix ultimately self-reported the issue to us, we expect companies to inform us of any possible contraventions as soon as possible, which did not happen in this case.
Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s Enforcement Director, 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.
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Notes to Editors
- The purpose of a challenge age is to account for potential error in the age estimate where someone is mistakenly predicted to be older than are. It is similar to the approach used for selling alcohol, which is widely used, for example, in licenced premises, shops and supermarkets.