A woman who almost lost her house after being fired in the pandemic says that she now makes more than £10,000 per month selling naked photos on OnlyFans.
Grace Taylor, 28, saw an advert on Instagram for a company looking to recruit 'webcam models' in early 2020.
The former telecoms project manager, from Sussex, was skeptical but decided to sign up and earned £350 in two hours talking dirty to men on the phone and stripping on camera.
After losing her job in the pandemic, she returned to the side-hustle and launched her OnlyFans page posting naked pictures of herself to hundreds of subscribers paying a £7 per month subscription.
With this and her webcam modelling work, Grace says that she now earns £120,000 per year compared to her £30,000 annual salary at her previous job in technology.
Grace said: "I could have dwelled on it and crawled into a hole, but my flight or fight response was to be driven and make it work.
"From this experience, I would never go back to working for a corporate company again."
OnlyFans boomed in popularity during the pandemic and is cited in a catalogue of 'rags to riches' stories.
But competition on the site means many will not earn as much as Grace says she rakes in.
Membership has surged to 130 million users worldwide but thousands who are driven to the site through poverty still struggle to make money.
The site, which is famous for its raunchy adult content, can also hamper future employment opportunities.
But, according to Grace, the change in her work has transformed her life for the better.
Grace turned to OnlyFans after she was told that her tech job was being immediately terminated in March 2020 and panicked about money.
She said: "I remember sitting at home in a complete state of shock and just thinking, what do I do now?
"I don't come from a family of money so I don't have anyone to rely on."
Having just bought her own house and car, she was terrified about losing everything she had worked so hard for and immediately contacted local recruiters in search of an alternative job.
But with the pandemic raging on, Grace was told that all recruitment was on hold besides part time jobs in her local supermarket.
So she immediately got back in contact with the porn cam company and also started her OnlyFans page.
With her earnings, Grace has splashed out on a £60,000 Jaguar F-Type and spent more than £15,000 on cosmetic procedures including fillers, botox, teeth veneers, and transforming her breasts from a C-cup to a K-cup.
She is into a fetish called 'dollification' and wants to look like a real-life barbie doll, something her fans are only too keen to support.
The biggest challenge Grace faced was telling her family about her work, yet despite a look of confusion initially from her mum, Grace says that almost all of her family now accept what she does for a living.
However, she has to be adaptable on the job with those phoning in asking for a variety of kinks to be fulfilled.
According to the self-titled 'bimbo,' one of the more unusual calls she has received was from a man who wanted her to act out stabbing him to death, while he acted as if he was being killed down the phone.
She said: "I do get more unusual calls and there's a particular caller who likes to ask me to hold up my arm and then pretend to slam a dagger into his chest, but it's quite therapeutic to stab the bed and get a bit of stress out.
"It's fascinating from a psychological point of view, the type of kinks people have and trying to understand the reasons for them."
She said: "In the beginning, I lied to my mum about what I was doing as I was worried about how she would react.
"She looked a little shocked and confused, but she's not an idiot. She was very inquisitive and asked me loads of questions and because I was new to it, we were really learning all about it together, although I didn't want to go into too much detail.
"Ultimately, she was incredibly supportive and totally understood where I was coming from.
"Unfortunately, I fell out with my sister big time over this and I think there was a jealousy aspect to it for sure.
"She didn't understand why I was doing it but once I explained and told her all about it, she has become a bit more accepting."
