Running an OFM agency in the United States: what is legal, and what is not.

Every founder in this sector eventually asks the same question, usually at two in the morning: is what I am doing actually legal? The short answer for the United States is yes — and the useful answer is that legality is not a property of the business model, it is a property of a small number of specific practices. Two agencies with identical websites can sit on opposite sides of a felony line, and the difference will be four or five operational decisions.

This guide sets out where that line is drawn, what the federal and state law actually says, and what a compliant agency looks like in practice.

The starting point: this is a services business

An OFM agency sells marketing and management. It runs social accounts, produces and schedules content plans, handles direct messages, negotiates brand deals and platform terms, and takes a percentage or a fee.

That is a normal commercial arrangement, and it applies to an activity that is itself lawful: producing and selling non-obscene adult content between consenting adults is lawful in the United States and has First Amendment protection. Paying a performer to appear in such content is not prostitution — the standard authority is People v. Freeman, in which the California Supreme Court reversed pandering convictions against an adult film producer in 1988, on the basis that the payment was not for anyone's sexual gratification but for a performance.

So an agency managing creators who film content and sell it online is, structurally, in the same legal position as a talent agency. The exposure comes from what gets added to that.

Where the line is: in-person services

State law is where prostitution lives, and every state criminalises it, along with a family of offences aimed at the people around it: pandering, pimping, promoting prostitution, deriving support from the earnings of a prostitute. The names differ; the structure does not. They target anyone who procures, arranges, encourages, transports or takes a share of the proceeds of in-person commercial sex, and they are felonies.

For an agency, this matters in ways that are less theoretical than they sound:

• A creator who meets subscribers for money, with the agency arranging, promoting or taking a percentage.
• "Collabs" organised or paid for by the agency where the reality is paid in-person sexual services rather than a content shoot.
• Escorting income run through, referred by, or commissioned by the agency.
• Taking a share of any of the above, even passively, once you know what it is.

"I only took a percentage of the OnlyFans income" is not a defence if the agency knowingly facilitated the rest. And the practical trigger is almost never a raid — it is a creator falling out with the agency and telling someone.

FOSTA-SESTA and the federal layer

FOSTA-SESTA, signed on 11 April 2018, did two things. It narrowed Section 230 immunity so that platforms can be liable for user content in sex-trafficking cases, and it created a new offence at 18 U.S.C. § 2421A.

That offence reaches anyone who, using a facility of interstate commerce, owns, manages or operates an interactive computer service — or conspires or attempts to — with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person. The maximum sentence is ten years. An aggravated violation, where the conduct promotes the prostitution of five or more people or acts in reckless disregard of sex trafficking, carries up to twenty-five years and civil liability to victims.

An agency operates interactive computer services almost by definition: accounts, messaging systems, sometimes its own site. The element that decides everything is therefore intent. Managing content creation is not facilitating prostitution. Using the same accounts to arrange paid meetings is. This is why the operational rules below are not bureaucracy — they are the evidence of what the intent was.

It is worth noting that FOSTA-SESTA has been heavily criticised, including by sex workers' organisations, for pushing activity into less safe channels, and a constitutional challenge (Woodhull Freedom Foundation v. United States) ran for years without striking it down. Whatever one thinks of the policy, the statute is on the books and prosecutors use it.

Trafficking and coercion: the bright line

Separate from prostitution offences, federal trafficking law (18 U.S.C. §§ 1589–1591) criminalises obtaining a person's labour or commercial sex acts through force, fraud or coercion, and any commercial sex act involving a minor regardless of coercion.

Coercion is broader than people assume. Debt bondage, threats of exposure, withholding identity documents, threatening to release someone's content or reveal their identity, and abuse of legal process all count. Which is why certain contract terms are not merely unenforceable but genuinely dangerous:

• Exclusivity with no exit, or exit conditioned on paying an unpayable sum.
• Penalty clauses that grow if the creator stops working.
• Holding a creator's account credentials or earnings as leverage in a dispute.
• Threatening publication of content or identity if a creator leaves.

An agreement that a court would call unconscionable is bad. A pattern of pressure that a prosecutor could call coercion is a different order of problem.

Age and records: the one that ends agencies

Every performer must be verifiably an adult, and there is no good-faith defence worth relying on.

18 U.S.C. § 2257 imposes record-keeping requirements on producers of sexually explicit content: verified age documentation, records of legal name and any stage names, indexed and maintained. The scope of § 2257 as applied to secondary producers has been litigated and is not simple, and platforms impose their own verification. None of that changes what an agency should do, which is to keep, for every creator and every third party appearing in content:

• government-issued ID, verified and retained;
• a signed model release and consent for each shoot, with scope and usage;
• a record of who appeared in what and when.

Content involving a minor is a federal offence with mandatory minimums, and no contractual arrangement, agency policy or claimed ignorance survives it. Verify every single person on camera, including guests who appear once.

Section 2257 is not the only paperwork

Two more obligations that agencies routinely overlook:

Advertising and endorsements. The FTC requires clear disclosure of material connections in endorsements. An agency running promotional accounts, paid shout-outs or affiliate arrangements is squarely inside those rules.

Consumer protection. Deceptive practices in messaging — promising something that will never be delivered in order to extract payments — attract state consumer-protection statutes and, at volume, potential wire-fraud attention. This is the real risk of an aggressive chatting operation, and it is much closer to home than FOSTA.

What a clean agency looks like

The compliance posture is not complicated, and it is largely the same posture that makes an agency worth buying:

1. A real entity, with its own bank account and no personal spending through it. See our guide on LLC, S corp or sole proprietor.
2. Written contracts with creators: services defined, commission defined, term and exit defined, IP and content ownership defined, and no clause designed to make leaving impossible.
3. A written no-meet-ups rule, acknowledged by every creator and every chatter, with what happens if it is broken.
4. Chatter policies in writing: no promises of physical meetings, no off-platform arrangements, no misrepresentation about what is being sold, logged access.
5. Transparent accounting: statements, a defined payment schedule, and creator money that is never treated as working capital.
6. Age and consent records for everyone who appears in content, kept properly.
7. Contractor documentation for chatters and managers, which is a separate exposure covered in chatters: employee or independent contractor.

In short

Managing OnlyFans creators is a lawful business in the United States. It stops being one when the agency arranges, promotes or profits from in-person sexual services, when consent or age is not verified, or when contracts and conduct cross from hard bargaining into coercion. The distance between a normal agency and a criminal exposure is a handful of decisions, all of which are yours to make and all of which are cheap to make correctly.

This guide is general information, not US legal advice. We work with agencies on contracts, structuring and compliance across jurisdictions, and with US-qualified counsel where the question is one of US criminal or state law.

Your contactOlivier MaciejewskiFounder of OFM Legal · Former international business lawyer (HEC Paris, Arendt, Clifford Chance) · Official MYM partnerHis background Updated August 14, 2026

This article is general information and does not replace advice tailored to your situation. OFM Legal is not a law firm: court proceedings are handled by our partner lawyers.

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