back to article Backpage.com swoop: Seven bods hit with 93 charges as AG Sessions blasts alleged child sex trafficking cyber-haven

After the Feds swooped on the Backpage.com website on Friday, they promised to outline why. Now on Monday, they have unsealed a 93-count indictment of seven of the dot-com's staff and investors, as well as seizing the domain name. Backpage carried classifieds for things like jobs and cars as well as adverts for people of …

  1. a_yank_lurker

    Sounds Like Old Timey Crime on the Internet

    The list of charges sounds like the ferals think backpage was primarily a front for trafficking and money laundering. The only twist was backpage was online.

  2. GrumpyKiwi

    More like

    Sounds more like the Defs were getting antsy that since pot was becoming legal in too many domains they were losing their 'quick and easy headline' options and so have moved away from drugs and into "hugs".

  3. SpeedEvil

    The argument around sex trafficing is made prominently in this indictment.

    Does it in fact exist meaningfully?

    http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/article_6b121b50-0519-11e8-a529-eb8b5f3a7cd3.html as an example.

    In New Orleans, a large number of raids were made of strip clubs, with the explicit claim at the time that they were due to sex trafficing.

    No actual arrests were made on trafficing charges, and no trafficed women were found, despite large numbers being detained.

    If it is moving consenting adults away from a situation in which they have some measure of safety and can determine their actions, towards other situations (the street) where they do not, that is not better.

  4. tip pc Silver badge
    FAIL

    Why are they not going after those that advertise rather than the platform? Is thi s not like a honey trap where all the most blatant offenders are showing their hand and presumably presenting an easily arrest-able front for the feds?

    Closing the platform will just push these crims further underground and make them harder to find.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Why are they not going after those that advertise rather than the platform?

      Going after thoar that advertise is hard and doesn't get the headlines that shutting down a site does.

      As usual the feds go for the low hanging fruit that is easy to grab with the biggest amount of publicity.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A moral panic hiding is plane site

    Nice to see Jeff Session's and the FBI relaunching a "White Slavery" moral panic from the turn of the century:

    https://reason.com/archives/2008/03/13/the-white-slavery-panic

    Should fit nicely with the administrations war on immigrants. I've always said what America needs is more paternalistic old white guys working with women who obsess of how other women use their bodies to slut shame and marginalize them into submission.

    This will help get these women back out on their on the street so the violent pimps and serial killers can get a better crack at them.

    The war on drugs and war of terror has left little remaining of the Bill of RIghts, but these men will go down in history as men who paid the ultimate price to protect a document law enforcement, judges and prosecutors have become accustomed to using for toilet paper.

    Well, except when they are convicted of the crime. Then it's all about due process, constitutional right and the rule of law. In today's America, only the powerful and politically connected get Constitutional Rights.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Below is a repeat of an earlier post on this subject. It suggests that LEO made little use of the honey pot that the adverts provided - which were presumably the 20% of cases that were stings.

    In other parts of the report it suggests that LEO following up the adverts would have found a pimp in close proximity. Up to 50% were off-line advertising channels - including 10% of cases which were "street-walkers".

    It does seem like an intention of "kill the messenger" - especially when they are resorting to financial laws like the historical Al Capone case.

    ===============

    An academic study (2010-2015) analysed statistics of cases over the six years.

    The figure for "use of technology" does not necessarily mean advertising online. It can also include recruitment of victims via various fora - and setting up response appointments.

    A figure for non-online advertising would appear to be anywhere in the range 32% to 58%. With a higher probability towards the lower end of the range. If it is assumed that Backpage.com was by far the largest forum for adverts online - then non-online advertising could be as high as say 50%.

    The analysis makes no mention of other forms of advertising - except that only about 10% were through direct street contact.

    Only 20% of cases were police stings - presumably following up adverts. Whereas 32% were complaints by the victims or their families. It is possible that other cases were a by-product of actions against gangs and drug dealing.

    Quotes:

    67.3% of the cases used technology (email, online ads, smartphones) in the sex trafficking activities.

    o

    Backpage.com was used by the sex trafficker in 592 cases (41.8%)

    [...]

    More than half of the victims were runaways.

    o

    Most cases were reactive cases with a report being made to law enforcement by

    the victim (18%), their family (10.5%), or an anonymous caller (3.3%).

    o

    20.8% of the cases were identified through police stings

    /Quotes

    1. SpeedEvil

      "67.3% of the cases used technology (email, online ads, smartphones) in the sex trafficking activities." Or, in other words, as in the commission of every other crime.

      A tiny, tiny minority of the adverts on backpage were for trafficed minors.

      And any 'risk reduction' assumes that backpage going away will make minor trafficing go away, or make it safer for those trafficed. Which seems very, very questionable.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. x 7

    I can't comment about the USA, but a large majority of the UK Backpage escort adverts were for trafficking victims, not necessarily underage.

    Because of the ease of placing ads on Backpage compared with the competition (e.g. Adultwork) with no checks or proof of identity or legality of the poster or girl, usually no photo (or if there were, they were stolen from other sites) the trend was for Backpage UK to be used by the Chinese and Russian (and to a lesser extent Romanian and other EE) trafficking gangs in preference to Adultwork or Vivastreet.

    But trying to locate girls through the adverts would be hard: regularly changing phone numbers and addresses, very short-term adverts, fake photos, and the girls rotated between sites on a regular basis to make identification difficult. Many of the adverts only had an e-mail address, no phone number, making contact harder and making it much harder to track victims.

    The shutdown of Backpage wont make much difference to the ability to track victims. If Adultwork or Vivastreet were shut down then the situation might be different.

    Backpage = good riddance

    1. israel_hands

      Proof?

      @x 7: Any evidence to back that up? Not saying it's not true but just prior to the 2012 Olympics there was a huge fuss made by gov about sex trafficking which was quickly debunked by every fact-based study you could find.

      As to the rest of the article, why the fuck are the cops patting themselves on the back so fucking hard? They've taken down a website and the associated ads. Number of children saved from sexual exploitation by this action: 0. Number of traffickers/exploiters arrested/proesecuted: 0.

      Don't get me wrong, the fact that the shady cunts running the site seemed to not give a shit about people actively searching for sex ads offering kids is fucking horrific, but this seems like going after a big, noisy, soft target rather than the actual hard job of arresting the pimps and paedo's and rescuing women and kids from sexual slavery.

      1. x 7

        Re: Proof?

        no evidence I can safely publish

        lets just say I spend a lot of time looking at this kind of data.

        In this case I think the decision to take down the site was correct. Attempting to identify the girls and pimps and then rescue them would be too difficult for the reasons I gave earlier. This way they're taken off the market for a while and hopefully the pimp's replacement sales strategy will be easier to crack

        If for instance they switch to Adultwork they'll be a lot easier to nail down

      2. x 7

        Re: Proof?

        2012 Olympics - whatever the "fact based surveys" may have shown, there was a hell of an influx of Russian, other Eastern European, Brazilian and other girls into London - which was obvious from the numbers being advertised

  8. Davich

    @ X 7 "I can't comment about the USA, but a large majority of the UK Backpage escort adverts were for trafficking victims, not necessarily underage."

    Only if you consider "trafficking victims" to be 'foreigners of the wrong colour'.

    1. x 7

      "Only if you consider "trafficking victims" to be 'foreigners of the wrong colour'."

      stop trying to create a racist diversion.

      Its true the majority of girls on UK Backpage were Chinese/Brazilian/Eastern European

      A minority were UK. The UK girls were less likely to be victims of coercion, but some certainly were.

      But the simply numbers spoke for themselves: for instance the number of chinese girls on overstay visas forced to work off debts their traffickers had racked up for them

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        '"Only if you consider "trafficking victims" to be 'foreigners of the wrong colour'."

        stop trying to create a racist diversion.'

        I think what the poster was objecting to is what I object to when discussing 'traffickers', the deliberate conflation of the subjects of coerced trafficing the subjects of which are effectively slaves with voluntary illegal immigrants. The boundary can be gray because once outside legal immigration the lack of a legal status can be used to coerce or blackmail the people concerned but the idea that Britain is awash with coerced sex workers is nonsense. This is mercifully quite rare and if we ar econcenre dabout it teh best thing to do woul d be to legalis eall aspects of prostituition

  9. Georgie1234

    How do you know that the majority of backpage ads in the UK were for trafficking victims? Do you have facts to back this up! I agree that there should be ID verification before posting a sex advert as is done on Adultwork, believe me AW do a very thorough job of checking that you are who you say you are. I have been a member for a long time and it was not easy to get verified.

    I am a sexworker and I use or should I say used backpage as it was a very good source of revenue for me. I chose to be a sex worker and I do very well from the income it generates, I also would like to add that I pay a considerable amount of tax. If my advertising source was cut off that would affect my income, which would then mean I could lose my home, my children may not be able to continue at university, I would lose my car, I would not be able to carry on with my voluntary work in my free time, there would be another person on the dole. Most of us woman who advertise on these sites are not trafficked, we all have families who rely on us, we’re tax payers, we are just trying to do our jobs and earn a living like anyone else.

    As for our clients they come from all walks of life we have disabled men that aren’t able to have relationships but need some love, comfort, touching and tenderness, widowers who miss their wives touch, married men whose wives are too ill to have sex, married men whose wives don’t want to have sex, married men who don’t want to have affairs but will if they can’t come to see us, and of course all the other ones who want to try someone different. Yes it’s not always right or not what one considers moral but this is life, it’s the worlds oldest profession. It may not be the right thing to say these days but men need more sex than women, it’s instinct, testosterone and masturbation is not enough. We sex workers provide a service and a valuable one. Whatever is done by governments police and laws is not going to stop traffickers the operate outside the law, selling sexual services will go on to the dark web and new ways will be found to carry on. Once we lose our normal places to advertise then we face the dangerous choice between no work and going underground which will put us in danger. The more underground it goes the more likely that us women, over the age and untrafficked girls will be unemployed and the girls who remain will be the trafficked minors.

    Surely better to legalise prostitution in countries where it is legal, set up mandatory health checks as in Austria and allow girls to work in twos for safety reasons. The Swedish model of just criminalising the clients does not work it has just been adopted in Ireland also. I work in both these places and my business has not been affected at all.

    To me the best option would be to ensure that these sites make stringent verification checks so that no minors are being advertised. As with everything there is no way to completely stop trafficking just make it more difficult. Traffickers are criminals they work outside the law, they do not fear the law, the top man is quite happy to lose people lower down the food chain he can hire new staff. Charging these men at backpage will do absolutely nothing to prevent trafficking. Also are sites that advertise live in maids, au pairs, housekeepers, gardeners, hotel workers etc going to also be closed down, these are also workers that can be trafficked? Farm workers fruit pickers also can be victims of human trafficking it’s not just prostitution.

    1. x 7

      @Georgie1234

      Georgie

      I'm making no criticism of you, your work, or your way of life. I'm not suggesting in any way that you should be stopped from working. If anything I'd prefer to see the system regularised in some way so that there's no room for the likes of the crooks at Backpage to make money through exploitation.

      You're right about the difficulty of identifying who is / isn't trafficked / exploited. There's a fine line sometimes in deciding the truth.

      But, yes I've been watching this for a few years now and I'm confident of the figures. Backpage was a criminals paradise: in most cases either the girls were victims, or the adverts were come-ons for the punters to get ripped off.

      You use Adultwork. Good, the chances of a trafficking victim being on there are a lot lower and have reduced in the last year with the extra verification checks, but there are still some especially among the chinese / romanian / hungarian / russian girls. But they are relatively easy to spot.

      As for other businesses, yep you're right. Car washes, farms, nail bars, cannabis greenhouses - they all need close attention.

  10. User McUser

    The War on Prostitution

    Remember when they declared war on drugs and now you can't get drugs anymore?

    It'll be like *that*.

    1. Georgie1234

      Re: The War on Prostitution

      Exactly like that!

  11. mark l 2 Silver badge

    The story from the other day said that Craigslist has removed their 'Personals' section from their website in response to the Backspace shutdown. Yet Craigslist haven't removed the personal section from their none US sites. Its still their on the .co.uk domains.

    The I noticed that the .co.uk domain for Backpage was also seized by the Feds though.

    Unfortunately i doubt any of this will make much difference to people being trafficked for sex, no doubt another website is poised to fill the gap left by Backpage, and if its owner are based outside the US it will make it harder for the feds to shut it down, so perhaps they will have to do some actual police work and go after the real targets, the pimps forcing these women/girls in to sex for money.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    but don't worry!

    because as soon as a nearly foolproof way to tax such transactions exist, a political movement will come along demanding "legalization" of every aspect and variation, and sell it to the voters with "think of all the schools and roads this tax money will completely fund!"

    and then just like State Lotteries, money pours in but schools, roads, etc. always have another bond measure to vote in each year because "there's no money for basic services".

    I expect a grassroots movement to lower age of consent to be rising up within the next 5 or 6 years as well, to increase tax revenue.....

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "I expect a grassroots movement to lower age of consent to be rising up within the next 5 or 6 years as well, to increase tax revenue....."

    Depends on where you live whether the age of consent against biology seems like Knut and the tide. Spain recently raised the age from 14 to 16. The Vatican has raised the age from 12 to 14 in line with Italy.

    The USA on paper seems to have a high age of consent generally. Then you find that half the states are resisting reform of their marriage laws. Currently those states allow marriage as low as 10 - although in theory it can be lower. The usual grounds are if the girl is pregnant and is then forced to marry her rapist.

    Some young boys have been forced into marriage too.

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