“Mature minds only;” The secret lives of discreet sexters earning up to ₦‎100k weekly online

In the past few years, there has been a boom of people sexting for pay on the internet.

With Arikeee Dami, or as she’s known on Instagram, “your girl T-Sexy,” video calls are ₦20,000. It’s the cheapest you can find, and she knows this. So you have to pay immediately, she gives you the price, forgo any kind of negotiations to beat it down, get to your best internet spot and wait for the call. “Mature-minded only,” she says.

Men gather in her comment section with heart-shaped emojis, fire emojis, and that emoji that has two heart shapes as eyes. It’s their favourite. One user who sells cars and has pictures of his daughter on his Instagram refers to her as “Sugar.”

How it works

In her videos, she appears as a kind of dominatrix, wearing nets and tights and balaclava or her signature red full-fringe human hair. Her props include extra large cucumbers and extra large dildos. “Which one do you want?” she asks.

“If you want to pay for a video call, go straight to the point. If you DM me for a video call and I give you the price, please don’t waste my time. I don’t do 5k videos. Video call is ₦20,000 naira and it’s the cheapest. If you don’t have this ₦20,000 don’t stress me. If you have trust issues, don’t come to my DM. If you’ve been scammed, don’t come to my DM,” she said in one viral video.

Thanks to her 33.1K followers, she also runs a micro-influencing business on the side, tagging the Instagram vendors she got her nets from. In her Instastories, she hawks a version of the red hair.

Since the dot-com boom in the early aught, the internet has changed how we date, how we marry, and how we raise our children. It gave rise to sexting, chats where people tell their partners what they’ll like to do to them if they were in the throes of passionate sex.

Then, commercial sexters were relegated to the dark corners of the internet. But in this age of TikTok, they are no more hiding in the shadows. They have Instagram accounts that take up multiple personas and invite wandering men (and women) to slide into their DMs for a paid chat. But if they have some extra cash, between ₦50,000 to ₦100,000, why not a video call where they help the men imagine all their sexual desires have come true?

Berry, who charges 50k for a chat session, is very clear about what she will not entertain. “No time for lengthy conversations, get straight to the point,” she said. “Can you people be reading profiles before you collect numbers,” she added angrily during a chat with Technext.

“There are platforms where you get paid for it and there are platforms where you do it just for the fun of it,” Evelyn*, who used to be in the industry, told Technext. But in the past few years, it has spread out to the mainstream and many other channels, she said. While Dami, for instance, meets her clients on Instagram. Berry opts for WhatsApp.

The sexters delineate the terms of the conversation in detail, which could include anything from whether or not she will be sending pictures of parts of her body to how freaky the chat will be.

Read also: CodedRuns: The rise of a discreet online sex trade industry in Nigeria

In the past few years, commercial sex has been more accessible with the rise of websites like Seeking Arrangement and CodedRuns. But Evelyn says the clients keep returning because they fetishise chatting with women like this. She says that an inferiority complex comes into play for some of the people that frequent the commercial sexters because these are women that they might not be able to speak to in their personal lives.

“Different strokes for different folks,” she said.

“The business is very lucrative, for starters the money might not be as much as people who have been in it for a while. A starter can earn from ₦50,000-₦100,000 in a week, while those in the game can earn more,” Evelyn said. Once, she said she was offered $50 by a client to show a part of her body. But she turned it down because she didn’t want to show her body parts.

She said that for some of these sexters when they start the whole “home-training guilt comes in. But, as you continue it fades away. And besides once you start making so much money, clients pay for trips and all that, you won’t remember any guilt.”

Why do people go into this line of work? It’s no different from the reasons people have gone into sex work for centuries; because they need cash urgently. “Some may need money urgently to solve an urgent family matter. Everyone has their reasons,” Evelyn said.

The industry’s success has ascended over the years because of the secrecy. Commercial sexters keep their clientele discrete; many clients contact them with pseudo accounts.

“People that are patronising this don’t want others to know that they are, so they hide their identity,” Evelyn said. “You don’t let people know who your clients are.”

The industry is also thriving because commercial sexters are offered an added layer of safety sexting from their homes. In the past few years, the murders of stars of the subscription platform favoured by the adult entertainment industry, Onlyfans have been on the rise, from stabbing by jealous fans to angry husbands.

With sexting, it’s different because while some sexters keep an Onlyfans account, they largely limit their services to chats and video calls.

The Future of commercial sexting

Arguably one of the oldest professions, commercial sex has followed us all through the years, taking on different forms. Now that the world has gone digital and sexting has been created, another form of commercial sex is rising. Commercial sexters like those before then are prime to make their killing.

Additional report by