Trafficking in human beings for sexual and other purposes - Polisen

3. Criminal Development19The National Bureau of Investigation can state thattopics concerning the purchase of sex, escort servicesand other prostitution activities are absorbing tomany people. On the Secretary Academy website andon the Flashback and Hard Facts discussion forums,there are hundreds of pages with thousands of discussionthreads on these topics. Some of these threadscontain reviews, written by male sex-purchasers,about women who are being exploited for the purposesof prostitution. The reviews relate to whether thewoman fulfils the expectations of the man purchasingthe sex, her appearance, physical attributes and herwillingness to carry out the “services” promised onthe website. If the woman who has been booked is theone who actually shows up is also important informationfor the sex purchaser. Furthermore, the sex-purchasersexchange experiences such as how to avoiddetection, and about the best ways of going aboutpurchasing sexual services. The language used bythese men in their reviews is often sexualised, disparagingand offensive. The threads on the SecretaryAcademy on-line forum are also subdivided into differentregions: Sweden, other Nordic countries,Europe and Thailand.In 2011, none of these sites could be traced to aserver in Sweden. Instead, most of the websites werestored on servers abroad where these pages are notshut down. The site administrators made use of servicesthat analyse visitor traffic to a website to findout where users are located geographically in order tobe able to tailor the advertisements to the appropriaterecipient group and part of the country.The information from 2011 showed that sex-purchaserswere able to book women and girls via advertisementson the Internet, to be brought into Sweden,by phoning or texting a call centre based abroad. Thewebsites also displayed rates relating to the costs ofpurchasing sex. Travel and hotel bookings werearranged by the call centre, which also arranged forthe women to be sent to Sweden or to another country,depending on the wishes of the sex-purchaser.Information about the time and place of agreed sexpurchases was given to the victims and sex-purchasersvia phone calls, emails and text messages.Many of the women who were being sold for prostitutionthrough web-based escort businesses to malesex-purchasers in Sweden in 2011 were also being soldin other countries such as Finland, Denmark andNorway. The women were advertised for sale for afew weeks before their planned arrival in Sweden.Some advertisements contained Swedish mobilenumbers that were activated once the women hadarrived in Sweden. On the websites, men purchasingsex were able to book a woman to go to their home/hotel room (known as an out-call) or to book timewith the woman in an apartment brothel or in a hotelroom (known as an in-call).In 2011, the police Prostitution Team in Stockholmestablished that the sex-purchasers seemed to preferto use “out-calls” to a greater extent than before. Onereason for this is believed to be that the sex-purchasersconsider that the risk of detection will be less ifthey order a woman to come to their home instead ofexploiting her in a hotel room.In most of the cases reviewed by the NationalBureau of Investigation and the Stockholm PoliceProstitution Team in 2011, there were suspicions thatthe sales were being arranged by organised crimegroups or networks. Certain websites contained picturesof a large number of women who had been photographedin the same environment and/or werelinked to email addresses with similar names orthemes, or to the same mobile phone number. Theadvertisements were also published on differentwebsites but at around the same date.In 2011 the National Bureau of Investigation andEuropol reported an increase in Internet-basedadvertisements on certain large websites, allegedlybelonging to transsexual men from Brazil. Thead vertisements were aimed at male sex-purchasersin Sweden among other countries.