Drew Swantak & Jennifer Bui / Thrillist
Drew Swantak & Jennifer Bui / Thrillist

How I Make $200k a Year Demanding Money From Men Online

This past January, during the run-up to the annual Adult Video News Awards in Vegas, two provocatively clad women told me about a guy who gave them $84,000. He was Australian, they said, and the money was supposed to be for a session of live online camming. But he never bothered to collect his prize. Just wiring the money was turn-on enough.

The women, Maitresse Madeline and Mistress Lorelei Lee, made names for themselves as actresses in adult films, but they also indulge in the sexual art of “financial domination,” or “fin dom,” a craft that sounds like a cross between S&M and a big-store con (albeit, with extremely compliant marks, dubbed “pay pigs”). It fills their bank accounts while satisfying the carnal needs of guys who get off on giving money to demanding women.

It was a nice chat, until I started asking too many questions. After I requested proof of the $84,000 transaction, they became testy. It only got worse from there. When I reached out to them for a follow-up chat, a representative told me that they “felt the tone of the conversation was borderline disrespectful,” and that future interviews were out of the question.

Still, I was curious, so I kept looking. And I kept encountering the same problem: most wouldn’t talk, many were hostile (unsurprising, given their line of work), some struck me as outright fakes. It was hard going.

Then I connected with Princess Meggerz. Giving her age as “late 20s,” she lives in Brooklyn, seems forthcoming and down to earth, doesn’t take herself too seriously, and rakes in over $200,000 a year -- all of which she claims on her taxes. Her haul comes via cash and gifts from men who are happy to grovel online, fulfill Amazon wish lists, and send money via Western Union, all without meeting her IRL. They usually find the Princess through her website, meggerz.com, which commands, “Pay to obey.”

We met at a cocktail lounge near where she lives. She wore a casual skirt and a black tank-top that showed ample cleavage, courtesy of a devoted subject who ponied up $10,000 for implants. She’s got long brown hair, a girlish smile, and a wiseass demeanor. She’s sharp, and went out of her way to engage as she told me her story.

Of course, it goes without saying that the drinks were on me. But compared to her clients, I got off easy.


I always dabbled in the online world.
I remember being a teenager and getting a rush from the sound of AOL dial-up connecting. I chatted with other kids via IRC and learned HTML. By 18, I was pushing pictures through the Internet, and guys would ask me to tease them. They started paying me, sending money through PayPal, as long as I was willing to talk dirty to them. Every few nights, the same people would jerk off to online conversations with me via Yahoo Messenger. I started making a lot of money, and it turned into a career, with me charging $5 or $6 a minute to talk online.

Then, in 2010, I was talking to this one guy about fetish stuff. He was into being made to do low, pathetic things. He was getting so hot and he typed, "Princess, please make me pay you." I had read about financial domination online, so I knew what was about to happen. In my head, it was like, Ding, ding, ding; this is it. I told him to send me $2,000. I didn’t know if he would really do it. But he did, and the next day I picked up my cash at Western Union. I made a conscious effort not to thank him for sending it. I said, “I received the money, whore. Now get down on your knees.”

He thanked me for taking his $2,000. I thought that was terrific.

I wound up earning 30 grand from him that year. Now I have a guy sending me a mandatory $3,000 per month, but I usually end up with more. I’m on his payroll, and the money gets direct-deposited into my bank account. Last year he paid for a girlfriend and I to fly business-class to Greece. When we landed, his driver picked us up and handed us our island-hopping itinerary. Hotels and meals and everything were all paid for. The last week of the trip, I met a hot young Greek guy and bragged about him online. [The client] was jealous, but being jealous turns him on. Just hearing about me being with the Greek guy is enough of a reward for him.

I’ve thought about the psychology of financial domination, and what drives guys to just give away money. Some feel like they earn money and don’t deserve it. They see themselves as inadequate and believe that somebody better than them should be taking it. It turns them on to not be in control of their finances; I’ve had people ask me to blackmail them, but I don’t do it -- I’d rather not wind up going to jail and have no interest in digging up dirt or pulling off extortion scams. Whatever the case, though, the more they give up, the hotter they get. They masturbate as they send me money. It’s like other guys looking for porn online. A guy watches his money shipping out and his horniness escalates. He sends the 10th tribute of $100, realizes that he has never before given $1,000 in a single session, and it makes him crazy. He gets into that submissive space where he just can’t control himself. It’s like any guy who gets super horny and is feeling instead of thinking.

For myself, the fin dom is almost a turn-on. I don’t get to the point that it makes me horny, but I can get the equivalent of a semi-boner. Sometimes it’s not until later that I’m like, Wow, I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed that.

As far as my personal sex life goes, it’s surprisingly vanilla. But I do get into mind-fucking. I enjoy seeing how far I can push guys. I’ll try getting them to hold my purse or tie my shoes for me. And I’m almost always honest about what I do for a living -- even my mom knows and she’s fine with it; my dad doesn’t want to know. Guys usually assume that I’m easy, or tell me that they’re not into being financially dominated. Then they ruin first dates by asking me questions all night and thinking I will put them into bondage or something.

I get spoiled by my fin-dom submissives and can be so lazy sometimes. But why not? These guys make it easy to not work very hard. One of them randomly sends me $500 or $600 and I never actually hear from him. That’s his thing. He doesn’t even need direct contact from me. I blog or tweet about receiving his money, and the recognition excites him. I post, “Next time, pig, send me more.” That turns him on. In fact, the more I brag and the more I show off money, the more excited people get. It just keeps working in my favor.

Some guys claim to be taking out cash advances to pay me. Whether it’s true or not, they need the rush of giving up something valuable -- and I don’t feel at all guilty about taking their money. Then I get people sending me $20 in tribute. My response: “20 dollars? I wipe my ass with $20 bills.” Seriously, what am I supposed to do with 20 dollars?

I’ve communicated with slaves at work and told them that I need $100 right now. One guy responded, “Princess, I need the money for lunch.” I replied, “So eat out of the dumpster. I don’t care what you need. I am more deserving of your money than you are.” He sent it. But he happened to be in the right mindset. You have to remember that these guys do not do this for me. They do it for themselves. It’s a form of submission that gets them off.

Twitter has been really helpful. There is a guy who messages me on Twitter and I type back, “Snap, snap.” That signals him to send me $500. That generally happens every week. Guys send me money after they read a posting on my website. I don’t even have to do anything. But others are so needy. They send 10 emails a day, wanting to know how I am doing, telling me that they want to smell my feet and send me money. These are grown men! I feel like I am babysitting. I have others camming (at a cost of $10 per minute, before sending additional money) and talking to me in baby talk. I think they’re shit and treat them like shit. So it’s all very honest.

There are some guys who get off on being put in chastity (via a tricked-out plastic tube called “the CB-3000”) and combine that with financial domination. It needs to be wrapped up into a package that they relate to. This one guy, he had just turned 18, he had never paid anybody online before, and he wanted me to put him in chastity. He asked if I would hold the key -- actually both keys -- for his CB-3000. I charged an initial fee of $500 for that. I required him to post pictures of himself on a Tumblr account -- to prove that he didn’t get broken out of it. I sent him selfies that showed the key dangling around my neck. I think he paid me with his parents’ money and ate ramen noodles every day. But I don’t know for sure. It’s not my problem. I was supposed to hold the key for a month and ended up making a grand for doing that. After 45 days, I finally mailed one of the keys back. He was crying and whining for the key, but he was still sending me money. After getting the key, he emailed to say that he had the best release ever. Then I made him pay me a tax for coming. He sent another $100.

For the most part, everything is online and I don’t need to meet any of these men. That’s the way I like it. But there was one guy, who’d randomly send me $1,000 a month, and I actually got together with him. He lived in London and got sent to New York for six weeks. We met and he fucking fell in love with me. I stayed with him in his apartment in Chelsea. He paid when we went out to do things. We slept in the same bed and I made out with him when I was drunk, but it was clear that we were not going to have sex. He didn’t give me cash in New York, but as soon as he got back to London, he completely wiped out my Amazon wish list, which had like $6,000 worth of stuff on it. He bought me everything.

We stayed in touch but he wound up going to a therapist because of the financial domination. It turned out that I was not the only one; he slutted around. He told me about spending money on another girl. I wasn’t jealous, but I wasn’t happy about it either. I would rather have been the one to get the money. It wasn’t an emotional thing -- if he had stayed in New York, I wouldn’t have minded dating him, but I would have been looking for somebody better -- though I felt that I deserved the money. He fell in love with me and I spent a lot of time with him. Ultimately, his job relocated him to Dubai, where he can’t do sexual stuff on the Internet. We fell out of touch.

Michael Kaplan is a journalist based in Brooklyn. He has written for publications such as Details, Wired, Playboy, and The New York Times Magazine, covers gambling for Cigar Aficionado, and is the author of four books. Follow him: @kaplanwords.