When Patrick Kunz began chatting with a porn star on OnlyFans in April 2022, he couldn't believe his luck. Nikki was a blonde Hungarian bombshell who resembled his first girlfriend.

Soon, using the social media site's messaging function, he was chatting with Nikki about everything from their sexual fantasies to their shared love of cats. Kunz, who is 42 and works for an insurance company in Germany, paid her hundreds of dollars to make sex videos just for him, and thousands more in tips.

He fell deeply in love, he said. Nikki said she loved him, too.

Then Kunz started noticing strange things. She seemed to forget subjects they'd already discussed - a recipe for overnight oats, a picture of her own cats. He started asking questions.

"Who are you?" wrote Kunz, who allowed Reuters to read his OnlyFans chats with Nikki.

"What do you meann, babyyy?" came the reply. "It's meee!"

Kunz slowly realised he was chatting to more than one person. "I fell for her," he said, "but I'm not stupid." He was beguiled, he said, by an illusion of intimacy created by a "fraudulent" system.

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