That’s a tough question to answer – how do you know anyone is legit? But we’ll do our best.
🚨 Look out for scammers! 🚨
Some scammers pose as photographers, use our company name abbywinters.com in advertising for models, and offer them to bypass the casting / screening process.
These people are not associated with us. We only, ever direct prospective models to apply here on modelfor.abbywinters.com. More info.
We have a lot of info here on our modelfor.abbywinters.com site, and we encourage you to read it and form a list of questions for us. During the obligation-free application process, we make an appointment to call you and answer all the questions you have. 😌
“Initially one of you guys approached me on Reddit… I had an initial concern that it was all a big scam! But I don’t think it is! No, you guys are not… 😃😃.” (Mischa W, Jun 2021).
🦕History
Our customer-facing site (and parent company), abbywinters.com, has been around for 23 years now. You can see when we registered our domain name, in August 2000.
It’s not pretty, but you can hop into the Internet Wayback Machine and see how we looked in the year 2000, or really, any time from then to now (a reminder that our approach is to let models choose how revealing they are in shoots we make of them; some models might be doing more revealing stuff on the main site than you want to do, but that’s cool – we’ll go with your decision on that!).
“You guys cover everything nicely in everything you send… You’ve been doing this for years!” (Alexandra T, Aug 2021).
⚖️ Legal info
Our website address is also our actual legal company name, abbywinters.com BV. We’re based in the Netherlands. You can see our registration with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (you’d need to pay a small fee to get more extensive info, but the basic info is there for free).
As we operate in the European Union, we’re required to have a VAT (tax) number. Our VAT number is NL821153985B01, and you can look it up in various places online – the European Commission’s site is the most legit. Select the Member State of “The Netherlands”, enter just the numbers of our VAT number (so, 821153985B01), and click “Verify”.
We can arrange a call with our corporate accountants RSM, or our legal firm Labre (they won’t be able to share too many details about us, of course, but they can verify we exist and pay our bills on time).
Dun&Bradstreet is an organisation that tracks companies in the world, we have our own page on their site.
🗺️ Elsewhere online
You can see our Wikipedia entry, which is mostly factual.
You can check our Twitter account, @abbymodels.
You can check our Owners’ Quora account, where he often answers questions about porn.
You can read about the experience other models have had with us, published on places other than our own site, and read testimonials from some other models.
You can browse the info we provide to models who already work with us. We work hard to be open and honest in all our communications with models.
Like for movies and books and electronics, there are sites that only review porn sites. We appear on all of the major ones, and we always assess pretty highly. Check out how Rabbits Reviews and The Best Porn assessed us.
📍 IRL
We have a “registered office”, but we don’t actually work from there, we all work from home in many places around the world including…
- Our owner, some Shoot Producers, and the Accountant are in Australia 🇦🇺
- Customer Support, Content Admin, Sys Admin, Video Editors, and Imageset Processors are in the Netherlands 🇳🇱
- A Shoot Producer in Germany 🇩🇪
- A Shoot Producer and Model Liaisons in Spain 🇪🇸
- Senior Model Liaison, Shoot Producer Trainer in the UK 🇬🇧
- A Shoot Producer and Web Developer in Russia 🇷🇺
- A Shoot Producer in Colombia 🇨🇴
- Lead Web Developer in Ukraine 🇺🇦
- Shoot Producers, Rave Writer, and Model Liaisons in the US 🇺🇸
- Model Liaison in Hungary 🇭🇺
- Web developer in Malta 🇲🇹
- QA Tester in Argentina 🇦🇷
- WordPress Admin and JS developer in Venezuela 🇻🇪
If you live in those countries, we can probably organise a meetup 🥂 / 🍻, or at least a video chat! Ask your Model Liaison, who’d be happy to introduce you to someone local to you. They can share their experiences working with our company.
“I have a little bit of anxiety in general. Every time I don’t go through my agent and I get a referral like this I am a little worried about it being legit… But obviously, that wasn’t a problem.
Everyone was so nice, especially over the phone. Everyone was so nice and that made me feel and realise that this is legit. And the extensive questions and everything, of course. If it is not real, nobody is going to care about every little detail. It was great, everyone was great over the phone, everyone was great over email, the directions…That was probably one of the funniest shoots I’ve had.” (Myra, Jan 2021)
“The amount of professional equipment! The Shoot Producer had all these big lights and different lenses for photos and it helped to legitimize in my mind that this is a good thing.” (Alonya, Oct 2021)
🙋♂️ Ownership
You can email our Owner, Garion Hall directly at garion.hall@abbywinters.com. Garion has worked in the company since it started and acts as the Creative Director. You can learn a bit more about our illustrious owner on his AW Bio page as well.
You can email him to arrange a video call. You can also do a Google search on “Garion Hall” to see articles written about him, conferences he has presented at, and newspaper articles (not always flattering!).
☎️ Connect
During the application process, you can ask to talk to some other models who have worked with us and have them describe their experience. You’ll find they match exactly what we say here on this site.
Maybe this is not for you, but some models have asked us to call or video-call with their parents to alleviate their fears before their daughter travels to work with us, and we’re happy to do that for you (or with anyone, really).
If you have any ideas on how we could better “prove” we’re legit, we’d welcome your feedback! 😀