Thread by @ScottMStedman

NEW: I spent 18 months investigating the owner of @OnlyFans.

From a teenage hacker to an NFT whale who is accused of bribing senior Facebook employees in a covert offshore scheme, this is the dubious financial and business history of Leo Radvinsky. forensicnews.net/adminleo-onlyf…

Buckle up, this thread will be my major findings after over a year of poring over documents, flying to Chicago and touring one of Radvinsky's penthouses, and interviewing dozens of sources around the world.

Radvinsky first made a name for himself in the online pornography world by creating websites that purported to offer access to "hacked" passwords to porn websites, some of which referenced CSAM and/or other sexual crimes. These websites didn't link to any abusive material however

Instead, they were a way for Radvinsky to rack up affiliate bucks by referring would-be pedophiles and others to legitimate pornography websites. This was largely first reported by Forbes and confirmed by Forensic News. The article goes into more alarming detail.

Then, Radvinsky founded @MyFreeCams. Almost immediately, banks began to flag his transactions for indicators of money laundering. Forensic News acquired Suspicious Activity Reports totaling more than $1 billion in alleged suspicious transactions identified by numerous banks.

@MyFreeCams Almost all of the banks noted that Radvinsky's companies seemed to be layering their transactions. In other words, he was moving money around between accounts for no apparent reason, adding an unnecessary layer to his transactions.

In the 2010s, as the banks were filing SARs, MyFreeCams struck a large advertising deal with a top chatroom website called Chat Avenue.

MyFreeCams advertised their NSFW business for over a decade in chat rooms where the only loosely-policed age restriction is 13.

Chat Avenue has a dark history with online sex crimes. More details are in the article.

The MyFreeCams advertising deal with Chat Avenue was for a "substantial" amount of money, a source with knowledge of the deal told me.

Banks kept filing Suspicious Activity Reports on MyFreeCams and other Radvinsky businesses. Models on the platform were also alleging that their accounts were deleted arbitrarily with their wages taken. Radvinsky was buying penthouses, a yacht, farmland, etc.

Inside one of those penthouses (I flew to Chicago and got in the penthouse legally) there are tons of antiques and this:

By 2018, MyFreeCams was losing its popularity.

Radvinsky, according to reports, cold emailed Tim Stokely, the CEO of a regionally-successful UK company called OnlyFans. Not much later, Radvinsky acquired 100% of OnlyFans for an undisclosed sum that a source said was approx $30M.

When the pandemic hit, OnlyFans exploded. Records show that revenue in 2020 was approximately $338 million. 2021 numbers are not public yet, but revenue could top $1 billion, per Axios. Radvinsky was a billionaire.

But on the platform, *just* as on MyFreeCams, OnlyFans creators were being ripped off left and right. I've spoken to *dozens* of content creators who have had their accounts deleted and wages gone. Others had their accounts hacked, pending balance drained.

Additionally, I've reviewed payments to OnlyFans creators that appear to miscode Merchant Category Codes (MCC). Adult entertainers are being paid under the MCC category for things like "public relations"

Why would OnlyFans do this? One potential reason is to continue relationships with companies like Stripe, which process payments with *much* lower fees than payment processors in the porn industry.

Purposeful MCC miscoding can be bank fraud.

In August 2021, OnlyFans stunningly announced a ban on porn.

But in private messages to creators, they were saying that nothing would change.

Was the announced porn ban just a PR stunt? Google search trends show that the week of the announced ban, more people searched for "OnlyFans" than at any other time in recorded history.

6 days after the announced ban, OnlyFans reversed course. Today, OnlyFans is the 102nd most visited website in the United States.

Was the OnlyFans explosion of success authentic?

Multiple lawsuits say no. The suits say that Radvinsky and OnlyFans bribed Facebook employees to blacklist their business rivals by marking those who promoted OnlyFans rivals like FanCentro, as terrorists. All parties deny.

I spoke with a source who claims to have seen bank wires from OnlyFans to a Hong Kong-based cutout which then sent funds to offshore trust accounts for "senior Facebook executives."

I understand that subpoenas to banks will be coming soon for the civil suits.

I can't independently confirm the claims, but I do know for a fact that an OnlyFans subsidiary opened an offshore bank account in the Philippines and that MyFreeCams had a history of using offshore banks in Belize and elsewhere.

In 2020, Radvinsky moved his operations from Chicago to Boca Raton, after he purchased a sprawling $4 million mansion and property:

Radvinsky also became an NFT whale. I was able to figure out one of his crypto wallets by following a ton of open-source breadcrumbs. He has spent millions on NFTs in just a year. He has a crypto punk and a Bored Ape among other super high dollar NFTs.

He is the executive producer of @EthereumFilm, after spending about $260,000 on the project.

https://twitter.com/EthereumFilm/status/1420167930390536194?s=20&t=HgaGOQ7v1GZ_xpNTioxDlw

Radvinsky also bid on the Ukraine flag NFT a couple weeks ago, putting up 1,050eth (about $2.75 million) before he was quickly outbid.

He then moved all of the ether to a new address before sending it back to Coinbase, likely to withdraw. Another potential instance of layering.

Time will tell on the most scandalous aspect of this all: The alleged Facebook bribes. They have denied it publicly. But if I have learned anything about Radvinsky, it is to expect the unexpected.

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