Law enforcement going after Escort sites - MSNBC
 

This is a couple days old but I haven't seen it posted here. I think we have some Escort webmasters at GFY, thought they might care.

Vice squads troll online alleyways

Web escort services, sites that advertise prostitution,
even Web personals are scrutinized and pursued

Oct. 3 ? In July, Florida officials arrested the operators of an international Web site that brazenly advertised the ?escort services? of sex workers across the U.S. and six other countries. A judge promptly ordered the site closed. Florida law enforcement officers hailed the arrests as a huge victory and a significant step toward successful prosecution of sex crimes that have moved from Main Street to Cyberville. Small catch: the site never closed; it?s still active, including ads hawking $17,000 all day ?dates? with famous porn stars.

?TELL ME ABOUT IT,? says a clearly frustrated Chris Brown, a prosecutor with the Florida attorney general?s office, who is in charge of prosecuting the case against the Web site known as Bigdoggie.net in an investigation dubbed ?Operation Flea Collar.?

Brown also charged a dozen others in conjunction with the two owners, lodging 57 counts ranging from racketeering to aiding and abetting prostitution.

?As far as we know, this case may be the first or one of the first, in which we are going after not only the prostitutes we believe are the core members of this organization [bigdoggie.net] in the Tampa area, but also the [Web site] owners and the registered users of the Web site,? Brown said.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/809825.asp

I forgot to post my opinion on this:

What a bunch of right wing Christian moral police bullshit. Who is being hurt here? No one, not a single person. This is a victimless crime and it's just another chance for these right wing "tough on crime" morons to throw more people in jail. Why is prostitution illegal to start with? Because the fundamentalist religious nuts want it to be illegal.

These are the same assholes who want to put terminally ill people in jail for smoking pot.

Get a life! :)

This is very old news in the Escort Industry sweetie!!

Now you wanna know the rest of the story

:Graucho



ever read the history on steffiecam? hm
:Graucho

Land of the free indeed.

This is the new US Constitution:

http://www.genesis.net.au/~bible/bible.gif

It might be old news, but it's a (relatively) new article. :)

Do most escorts support the legalization of prostitution, or do they make more money because it's illegal?

w3rd

:1orglaugh
damn truth,,

However Charlie fucked seriously up with bigdoggie and trust me a lot of people wanted to see him gone

All the partner program checks bounced for month before they finally quit coming

They cops set up an Escort site online, got an invitation to join. Thats how they nailed him.

Charlie was a dirt bag, he was a pig, may he rot in hell.
He was from Washington DC and got into a huge fight with Decadent City in 98 and with me in 97.

You don't want to know how the Escorts made it to his top 100 board and what shit he required from them.

After his bust a lot of Escorts complained and when i posted on his board of what was going on my post was removed within 2 minutes. I posted again that bigdoggie was busted on their boards it was removed again and my account was suspended. Than I got a threatening email from his partner telling me to shut up and not to freak out everybody, its not true blah blah.

We all knew better but he didn't want to loose his $$$

There is a difference of running a good escort site like I know many webmasters who do, or being a PIMP!

:2 cents:

I better shut up now LOL

Angelika Potter, an entrepreneur who used to run an escort agency in Frederick, MD, was one of the first entrants into the Internet marketplace in the U.S. She says that the Web instantly tripled the income of her then one-year-old business back in 1996, when she started posting color photos of her girls on a website. "We had the pictures up there in 1996, when this was not even heard of," says the German-born Potter, who goes by the name "Steffie" on her (very) X-rated website, Steffiecam.com. "This is all about marketing." Indeed, advertisements in the City Paper, which can run $150 per week, are limited in their distribution, and, more importantly, they do not boast photos of the attractive escorts in all sorts of compromising positions. Another advantage is that "the Internet attracts people who have a computer, so they tend to be more upscale," says Veronica, another local madam.

Sexpreneurs are often on the cutting edge of business and on the razor's edge of the law. Potter still runs Steffiecam, which charges a $99.95 annual subscription fee for full access to "artistic" images and live video feeds, but her escort agency, Corporate Affair, was effectively dismantled in July 1999 when the police raided her business and made a copy of the agency's client list.

In November, Potter paid a nominal $100 fine for running a bawdy house in a plea agreement that stipulated that her seized property would be returned. But problems started brewing when word got out that law enforcement officials maintained a copy of Corporate Affair's client list in a safe, resulting in a flurry of lawsuits from various news agencies - including the Associated Press and the News Post - seeking to gain access to the company's little black book under the Freedom of Information Act. When asked if there were any business barons on her list, Potter brusquely retorts, "You know that we are in court with this; I am not going to talk about it. But you gotta look at it this way: If you are someone who is known in the community and you are married, you are not going to just go into a bar and pick up a girl."