Ah, the Freeloader. Perhaps the single greatest annoyance for camgirls and dommes everywhere. We’re doing a job, albeit often a rather fun one, and want to be paid for our time, indeed we need to be paid. Even dommes have bills to pay, and camgirls have to pay for the computer and cam they broadcast from. Yet the internet is infested with people who want to receive a service without paying for it. And anyone who works on cam sites will encounter these time thieves on a daily basis. They openly demand our time, or try to steal it. They are a pain in the ass, even if we don’t do ass play. They’ll come up with every possible tactic in their attempts to fool girls into giving them a free show or plenty of attention. And they have absolutely no intention of ever putting so much as a single dollar in the girl’s pocket. They drive us insane sometimes. I am unable to express just how strongly cam girls hate freeloaders. There are no words on a screen that can fully sum up the annoyance they cause with their cheapass attitude and assumption that we are there purely for the pleasure of helping them get off. They really behave as though we should generously donate our time and effort in the pursuit of helping them tug away at their cocks. It’s possibly the one aspect of camming that we loathe above every other annoyance. Nothing can beat this, because they’re everywhere, on every site, every single day that you go on cam. The only way to get rid of them is to use a site that doesn’t insist on free preview – and even then, you’ll find them elsewhere (or rather, they’ll find you).

Mistress Cristal shows just how annoying freeloaders are when she describes them as ‘scum’ and ‘leeches’. Every single cam girl and domme finds them utterly infuriating. They’re most prevalent on sites that insist on girls having a free cam room with a private option, or that work on tips. This is why I avoid sites that don’t allow you the option of switching off free cam, and I’ve never gone near a tips-based site. I just don’t want the hassle and annoyance of dealing with the type of jerk who comes in asking for “ass before pvt, bb” (I don’t show ass, and you just know he’d never go private anyway). Freeloaders often skip from one room to another, clicking on the profile of any model who’s online. They’ll hang around until they get kicked out, at which point they’ll move on to another room.

What are the characteristics of the freeloader? He hangs around in free chat asking endless questions. He has no intention of ever paying for a show. He asks for previews ‘just to be sure that you’re what I want’. He’ll promise to pay for a show when he gets paid. He’s carrying round a whopping great sense of entitlement and thinks (in the face of all logic) that girls owe him something. Well, these are my words to these idiots:

“NOBODY OWES YOU AN ORGASM” – or indeed one single moment of their time. I’d like to plaster that phrase on billboards outside the home of every freeloader. Freeloaders can be subtle, or they can be blatant. Some even say outright that they’ve no intention of paying for a show. The ‘Pay for your porn’ principle means nothing to them; they want to get off and they don’t want to pay for it.

Why do freeloaders behave this way? I suspect that a lot of them are motivated by the feeling that it’s somehow wrong to charge for sexual pleasure. That irritates me on a number of grounds. Firstly, I see no reason why someone cannot choose to monetise an asset, including their brain and body. Besides, cam work is not a publicly-funded service, and the girls working in this field have no obligation to devote their time and energy to helping hordes of horny guys to get off. I also suspect that for some freeloaders the pleasure lies in pulling off the deception, as much as pulling off their dicks: they get a kick out of knowing that they have stolen a girl’s time and won’t be paying her for it. They may also enjoy knowing that they’ve annoyed her when she realises that she’s been scammed. These freeloaders well deserve the name of scum that Mistress Cristal bestows upon them.

But the entitled freeloaders aren’t much better. This type think that they should have everything for free. It simply doesn’t occur to them that there is any need to pay for this service. Yet they wouldn’t dream of trying this on in any other situation. As Mistress Cristal observes, “Would you take your car into the garage, have it serviced and then say “yeah this is on the house – you need to service my car. I don’t need you!”” Correct – you’re never going to walk into a restaurant and demand that they serve you a free meal, and if you walked out of a supermarket without paying for your groceries, they’d have the cops on you before you even reached your car. Yet online sex work attracts many, many freeloaders.

So how do you deal with these assholes? Often, the best approach is to simply ignore them. They’ll soon get bored when they realize that they’re going to get nothing from you, and move on to plague some other poor cam girl. Some are, admittedly, very good at trying it on. But the longer you do this job, the more you develop and refine the ability to spot a freeloader. It becomes instinctive. They rely on the lure of the (non-existant) payment they’re dangling in front of you, hoping that you won’t kick out a potentially paying customer. But it soon becomes obvious that they’re not going to pay, and you learn to spot these guys before you waste any more time on their freeloading asses. Mistress Cristal has the right attitude; she uses free chat only to her advantage, as a “marketing tool”. She switches on free only when it suits her, and never gives a show in free. In fact, she gives absolutely nothing away: “No teasing flashes of feet, no Skype address, no kik usernames, no explicit chat – NOTHING until they have paid. If they send gifts, they don’t get ANYTHING until gift is received.”

A sub-species of the Freeloader that you should also watch out for is the scammer. He will pretend to pay for a show or other items, and then do a chargeback. So you’ve done the show, but have nothing to show for it. It’s abhorrent, but it happens. Always use a secure method of accepting payments. PayPal is a definite no-no for any kind of adult transaction, yet I still see dommes stating that they accept PayPal for a show. Stick to doing shows through a cam site and you’re on a more secure footing (especially if you work through a site that absorbs chargebacks). It may be annoying having to pay the site a cut, but it’s far preferable to finding out that you’ve worked for nothing. Many girls have an Amazon wishlist, and this is another way in which the freeloader can scam her out of a show. Never accept wishlist items in return for a show, as you risk finding that the item has been cancelled the moment the show is over. It happens a lot. Only do a show once the item is safe in your hands. You can also request gift certificates and redeem them straight away (but do be careful, as Amazon don’t like to be associated with adult transactions – which is odd when they sell adult items, but there you are).

Finally, try not to let the freeloaders get to you. They’re like a rash, and we do all get irritated by them. It’s upsetting and annoying when we’re trying to earn a living, and it’s also disrespectful. It’s saying that our time isn’t worth paying for, and that we ‘re not professionals (we are, and we work just as hard as anyone else, if not harder). It’s wise to accept that freeloaders do exist, and we’ll probably never get rid of them entirely (they’re one species that I wish we could wipe off the face of the planet, but sadly extermination is frowned upon, even of these annoying little timewasting tossers). So the onus is on us to learn how to deal with them, and not allow them to waste any more of our time by letting them stress us out. Identify them, ignore them, kick them out, delete their messages; these are all far more productive and less stressful than getting wound up. Save your time and energy for the paying customers. Work on producing material that will earn you money, and talking to the guys that will be interested in going private.