Ofcom has fined Fapello.com — a pornography streaming site — £600,000 for failing to run “highly effective” age checks, plus a further £30,000 for ignoring the regulator’s requests for information. It’s the second six-figure penalty Ofcom has issued under the Online Safety Act’s age-assurance rules in under a year, after AVS Group Ltd was fined £1.05 million in December 2025 for the same category of failure. For OnlyFans creators watching from the sidelines, the pattern matters more than any single fine.
What Fapello did wrong
Ofcom’s confirmation decision covers noncompliance running from July 2025 through 26 November 2025, with Fapello ultimately geoblocking UK users in January 2026 rather than build out verification. The regulator found the site had failed to implement age assurance “highly effective at determining whether or not a particular user is a child,” and separately breached Section 12 of the Online Safety Act by not responding to information requests about its worldwide revenue and operations.
Under the Act, sites hosting pornographic content must use “highly effective age assurance to prevent children from readily accessing that content.” Ofcom has been explicit that this is no longer a guidance-stage requirement: “We continue to investigate other services’ compliance with age check requirements and will take action where necessary.”
Why two fines in eight months is the real story
A single penalty could be dismissed as a one-off warning shot. Two — against different companies, months apart, both in six or seven figures — is enforcement settling into a routine. Ofcom’s own research bears out why it’s pushing so hard: 47% of children aged 8–17 who completed a highly effective age-verification check encountered it when trying to access age-restricted content after the July 2025 deadline, up from 30% before. The checks are working where they’re actually deployed; the problem Ofcom is now chasing is the sites that simply haven’t deployed them.
That’s a meaningfully different regulatory posture to the one covered in our earlier look at Ofcom’s age-assurance reporting, which tracked the scale of checks happening across the industry. This is what happens to the operators who didn’t do them.
What it means if you’re on OnlyFans
OnlyFans is not the subject of either enforcement action, and it has invested heavily in age and identity verification well ahead of the Online Safety Act’s deadlines — a genuine point of difference from the geoblocking, unverified tube sites Ofcom keeps fining. But two things are worth sitting with as a creator:
- Regulatory scrutiny of the wider adult platform space is intensifying, not easing off, and that shapes how banks, payment processors and app stores treat the whole category — compliant platforms included.
- Ofcom has said explicitly it’s still investigating “other services.” Nobody should assume the current round of fines is the last one, or that it stops at tube sites.
The practical takeaway is less about any individual creator’s exposure and more about which platforms are worth building a career on: ones investing in compliance now are the ones likely to still be operating normally in a year, as Aylo’s own mounting legal and settlement costs elsewhere in its portfolio continue to show.
This article is for general informational purposes and is not legal advice. Creators or platform operators with specific compliance questions should consult a qualified solicitor familiar with the Online Safety Act.
