LOS ANGELES—Porn is technically against the rules on the social media app Snapchat, but the site’s own focus on user privacy has made policing for adult content extremely difficult — though Snapchat bosses occasionally try.
As a result, the platform has developed an underground “cottage industry” of adult performers, both professional and amateur, who have turned the Premium Snapchat service into a significant source of revenue, as Wired Magazine detailed in a lengthy report last year.
But the opportunity to turn Premium Snapchat into a lucrative “side hustle” has also created a new genre of porn scam artist. Unlike more elaborate porn scams, which rely on tricking users with phishing emails then roping them into what amounts to a blackmail scheme, the Snapchat scam is relatively simple, according to one scammer who spelled out her method to The Daily Tar Heel newspaper.
“Vanessa,” a 20-year-old University of North Carolina student, told the school paper that her scam is simple — and pays her up to $1,000 per day. She posts a picture of herself in a lacy, $15 lingerie pair, along with the caption “hmu for my Premium.”
She advertises subscriptions in price ranging from $55 to $100 per day, with increasing levels of explicit content, starting with straightforward news, up to hardcore images of herself having sex. She then sits back and waits at as many as 100 mostly teen and 20something males message her to say they are “down” for subscribing to her content.
But there is no content. As soon as Vanessa secures a user’s subscription payment in her PayPal, CashApp or similar account, she blocks him. And she is careful to block each victim not only on Snapchat, but on all social media, just in case.
Free Speech Coalition spokesperson Mike Stabile, however, cautioned that accounts like the phony operated by “Vanessa” are the exception.
“I think that there often is this idea that this is the way the industry operates, as opposed to sort of these rogue people who come in and do it,” Stabile told The Daily Tar Heel.
“I just decided to do an experiment one day and I didn’t post about Premium, but I got a Venmo and a Cash App and I said, ‘Cash App me for a surprise,’” she told the paper, describing her original idea for the scam.
The Daily Tar Heel reporters wrote that they examined “a slew of PayPal and Cash App transactions that she has received in recent months,” to verify that her tale was actually true.
Many of her victims have reported her to the various tech companies whose software she exploiys, and the cash payment app Venmo has suspended her from the service — but “Vanessa” says she has cycled through 50 accounts on PayPal and CashApp.
“Vanessa” rationalized her scam, which amounts to felony fraud according to legal experts who spoke to the student paper, by telling herself that it allowed her to attend college without also needing to work a full-time job.
“I hate how people paint it in a bad light, but it’s always the people who have always had everything so they don’t really understand how much I need it,” she told the paper. “When you don’t have it, anyway you can think of, you’re gonna do it. No matter what the consequences might be.”
Photo By Santeri Viinamäki / Wikimedia Commons
