413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

A local circuit runs within Washington between Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma. Interstate travel tends to be
to Portland (only three hours by car), California (primarily San Francisco), and Las Vegas. Seattle pimps
often avoid traveling to Los Angeles, since as one local law enforcement officer explained, “The pimps
there don’t play and are very territorial.” He went on to note,
Escorts
The population within prostituting in Los Angeles is so much bigger than Seattle,
Portland, and Vegas combined, and they don’t need any more competition, so it is
eradicated promptly. You have the occasional naïve pimp, who tries stepping into L.A.,
and he is shot down pretty quickly, he comes home with his tail between his legs. It
doesn’t work out too well. (Seattle Law Enforcement Official)
There are only limited investigations of higher-end escort services conducted in Seattle; however, these
services are known to generate huge profits and contribute greatly to the UCSE. In the past, an escort
would charge from $105 to $150 per hour; but now the average rate is $250 per hour plus tips. There is
typically a 60-40 or 50-50 split between the girl and the escort agency.
John message boards are fast becoming a popular online venue for escorts—in addition to massage
parlors and brothels—to post advertisements. Boards usually require a subscription fee and provide a bit
more anonymity for the escort. They also allow johns to rate women based on skills and appearance,
which can help increase business. A unique practice in Seattle, facilitated through these local john
message boards, is the establishment of networking and social events. At these events, johns and sex
workers socialize with one another at an undisclosed venue and in some cases, celebrate holidays with one
another. One federal police officer in Seattle described the message boards and “networking events”:
In this community, there is a message board, probably of all the communities you’ll go to
you probably won’t find a message board like what we have here. It’s a local, locallyoperated
prostitution message board …. a review board. And this board, it’s basically
providers of prostitutes on their advertising. And there's the johns on there, they review
the women and communicate with them and to an extent, like if someone posts, the
provider goes on and says, “I opened a new house, brothel here, someone go test the
waters,” take one for the team as they call it, and post on there, “This worked out well, it
was clean, I got everything, I was happy,” so on and so forth. And then that leads other
people. They see a few people review it so then people get comfortable with it. And the
people who ran it actually would host—and I don’t know if they’re still doing it—but
they’d host holiday parties. They had a Halloween party and a Christmas party, where the
people on the message board would actually get together—it'd be invite only for people
that are active on the message board—they’d receive an invitation. And they would go to a
local restaurant where they would actually be able to interact and meet each other. They
may only go by whatever their name is on the message board, they wouldn’t actually use
their real name. But they would be able to interact. And there’d actually be a bit of a
relationship where there wouldn’t be just a random person referring you, it'd be like, “Oh
I met that guy at the party, he’d seen this girl, we liked the same girl and I'm just as
horrible.” So a lot of the massage parlors and the house based brothels, as well as
independent girls, are advertising on there. I don’t think you’d see juveniles on there. This
group wouldn’t want to see juveniles on there. They wouldn’t be happy with somebody
they thought would be a trafficking victim. They'd kind of be at least a step up from that …
And it was very simple, no advertising or anything like that except it was very run on
donations. Every year they’d solicit donations. So it was just a very generic message
board. There was nothing in the way when people look at it. Very simple, very easy to use.
So that kind of spanned all the different realms. (Federal Law Enforcement Official)
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