There was so much CP on Tumblr I wonder if it wasn’t an elaborate honeypot. It was sooo bad and over the top. People have no idea. There’s also been a lot of CP on Instagram, including child sex trafficking rings advertising their wares. Backpage was the largest single source of child sex trafficking operations in the US and many in LE knew it for years before it was finally shut down.
I’ve unfortunately seen far too much of what people don’t believe is out there. That’s what I get for helping anons “dig”. As they say “nothing is beyond our reach”.
This characterization of Backpage diverges significantly from the realities of the site uncovered by authorities [1]. Choice excerpt:
> "Information provided to us by [FBI Agent Steve] Vienneau and other members of the Innocence Lost Task Force confirm that, unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations," wrote Catherine Crisham and Aravind Swaminathan, both assistant U.S. attorneys for the Western District of Washington, in the April 3 memo to Jenny Durkan, now mayor of Seattle and then head federal prosecutor for the district. Vienneau told prosecutors that "on many occasions," Backpage staff proactively sent him "advertisements that appear to contain pictures of juveniles" and that the company was "very cooperative at removing these advertisements at law enforcement's request."
> "Even without a subpoena, in exigent circumstances such as a child rescue situation, Backpage will provide the maximum information and assistance permitted under the law," wrote Crisham and Swaminathan.
From the article: "Desiree Robinson, a 16-year-old girl who was brutally murdered in a Chicago-area garage last December, was sold through Backpage.com. Her mother, Yvonne Ambrose, testified at the hearing that her daughter was advertised on the website and purchased for sex by a 32-year-old man who killed her when she resisted."
In another story, a 13-year-old girl was kidnapped, raped, beaten, drugged, and put up for sale on Backpage, with pictures of her naked and battered. The girl was recovered alive and her kidnapper went to prison, but Backpage repeatedly refused to remove the ad and its pictures unless they were paid to do so. This was also linked directly from the article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/backpage-ceo...
> But all evidence shows that Lacey and Larkin did everything they could to stop or limit child sex trafficking on BackPage.com.
No, it really doesn't. They were going out of their way to reduce reports to law enforcement:
> The record also contains substantial evidence that, as a matter of policy, Backpage often chose to err against reporting potential child exploitation. As the Subcommittee reported in connection with its November 2015 hearing, in June 2012 Backpage instructed its outsourced third-party moderators only to delete suspected child-sex advertisements “IF YOU REALLY VERY SURE THE PERSON IS UNDERAGE.” In a similar email, a Backpage supervisor instructed internal moderation staff: “Young ads do not get deleted unless they are clearly a child.”
> In a similar exchange dated July 11, 2013, Vaught took issue with a moderator’s decision to report an ad to NCMEC due to “inappropriate content” and the moderator’s belief that the person in the ad “look[ed] young.” Vaught explained that she “probably wouldn’t have reported this one.” 268 The moderator responded that the girl or woman in the ad “looked drugged and has bruises”— obvious indications of trafficking—which led her to send the report. Vaught replied that the person in the ad did not look under 18 years old, adding that “[t]hese are the kind of reports the cops question us about. I find them all the time, it’s just usually you who sends them [(to NCMEC)].” Basing reporting on the appearance of the individual advertised, alone, may result in underreporting, however; as NCMEC has noted, “it is virtually impossible to determine how old the young women in these ads are without an in-depth criminal investigation. The pimps try to make the 15 year olds look 23. And the distinction of whether the person in the ad is 17 or 18 is pretty arbitrary.”
And they were ignoring requests from trafficked children to take down ads featuring photographs of those children:
> And in February 2010, a detective emailed Backpage to alert the company that a 17-year-old girl who tried to get Backpage to take down an advertisement of herself had been rebuffed: According to the detective, the girl “tried asking for [the ads] to be removed but was told they couldnt [sic] be until enough people reported her as potentially underage.”
And then there's the word stripping. People are clearly misunderstanding what happened there. An advertiser would try to palce an ad. Backpage's algorithm would respond "Whoops, you can't use that word", and ask the submitter to drop it. The submitter would change the word and resubmit the ad. Backpage would then delete any reference to the orginal ad. This means when law enforcement comes with a warrant Backpage can say "we don't have any ads for lolita, and we have no information about advertisers using the word lolita" -- because backpage had destroyed that evidence.
So, a site was made by a pedophile, they got that guy, and then kept the site online so they could make further arrests of people who viewed the site.
That's a massively different picture than what you get by reading the article, and the headline 'FBI's deep web child porn ring'. It wasn't FBI's child porn ring, it was this guy's child porn ring.
"She would go on to spread misinformation about the site and its co-founders, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, and she co-filed criminal charges that were quickly dismissed but succeeded at garnering headlines and photo ops that raised her political profile. In reality, Backpage.com had become a powerful tool for law enforcement to help catch sex traffickers because of the cooperation and commitment of the site's founders to that cause, whom Harris and many other states' attorneys general had painted as villains."
on a site revceiving tens of thousands of media a day over years, it's very to point to a dozen pieces and say that the entire site is full of it.
Humans don't reason with large numbers very well and I have a hunch that OF was just another recent victim of this psychological phenomenon. Especially when I read attempts to cast them that way with
>In May, BBC News revealed the site was failing to prevent under-18s from selling and appearing in explicit videos, despite it being illegal for children to do so. At the time, OnlyFans said attempts to use the site fraudulently were "rare".
but end up also mentoning:
> Under-18s have used fake identification to set up accounts, and police say a 14-year-old used her grandmother's passport.
aside form these mentions, most of the article focuses on prostitution. Which is a much more gray moral quandry than underage participants.
> Backpage is being targetted because it actively facilitated the kidnapping, drugging, and raping of children.
It's being accused of that, but it was probably targeted merely because it facilitated prostitution; MyRedbook.com was previously seized by the Justice Department, without any accusation of knowingly facilitate anything other than adult consensual sex trade (there were claims to the media by incestigators that “massage parlors” pimping minors used the site, but not that the site operators were knowingly facilitating that.)
> One of the advertisers, identified only as 15-year-old "E.S.," ''was forced into prostitution at the age of 13 by her pimp," according to an affidavit filed with the complaint. She used other online advertising services until they were shut down, the court filing says, when she turned to Backpage.
This reads horribly: the feds took down multiple sites and knew about this 15-year-old, but didn't manage to reach her in the process?
> "“I called Backpage dozens of times asking them to take down those photos, that my daughter was just a child and that what had been done to her was a crime,” says Kubiiki. “They refused and said if I didn’t pay for it, they couldn’t take it down. In the end they just stopped returning my calls.”"
I know. This is where it goes to almost cartoonish villainy.
I'm honestly bewildered how this even happens. This must have escalated up the support levels and involved several people, and one individual listing that isn't even applicable anymore can't be a huge revenue source for them. Even assuming that it's a company led by amoral psychopaths, why push back for so little gain? how did nobody in the chain of information say "what the hell are we doing"?
My wife has done some work with child exploitation organizations around this exact problem. Sadly, this is not a surprise at all. I’d venture that maybe 5% of the posts they report are removed, and the offending accounts are essentially never punished.
To make matters worse, given that pedophilia and child porn is now tied up with QAnon, some of her peers have started to have their accounts banned when they report this stuff, as apparently they’re being caught up in an anti-conspiracy filter.
There was /r/jailbait. There was also the time the CEO defended /r/thefappening and copyright infringement. It got awkward when some of the girls in the pictures said they were minors when the pics were taken. Oops.
Not CP, but there was also /r/creepshots. Ironically, that was more legal than /r/thefappening.
> Were these sites only (or primarily) discussion boards?
As many pointed out above, no. The majority of the forums looks to be advertisements for prostitution [0].
> Were they also used (with or without their operators' consent) to conduct illegal sex trade?
According to the FBI, "the website hosted advertisements for prostitutes, complete with explicit photos, lewd physical descriptions, menus of sexual services, hourly and nightly rates, and customer reviews of the prostitutes’ services" and the owner "engaged in more than twenty monetary transactions to launder the profits derived from the facilitation of prostitution" [1]. They are now looking to forfeit $5 million of those profits.
> If such activities were indeed happening without a site operators knowledge or consent, did law enforcement reach out to these operators in an attempt to curtail this activity?
While I couldn't find a source directly saying weather they did or did not, I would imagine it to be very difficult to collect enough evidence to go through with the forfeiture and trial while the future defendant knows they are being investigated.
I can't find a NY indictment, but the CA one is easy to find. Backpage principals are charged with:
* Systemic _knowing_ commercial promotion of prostitution.
* An elaborate internal management process focused on concealing evidence of their knowledge of prostitution, including internal employee training.
* _Knowing_ commercial promotion of child sex trafficking, in ads that included photos, in which their policy was to strip out keywords indicative of child sex trafficking while still running the ads.
* A long series of money laundering schemes to collect money from sex traffickers without routing those transactions through banks and credit card processing services.
* An elaborate series of financial moves designed to conceal their assets from prosecutors.
This isn't Craigslist. They ran the site like a criminal conspiracy, which is what it was.
I imagine they've plead guilty because they would have lost calamitously at trial, and the sentences they'd have received after a jury conviction would have been horrific. I'd imagine that if you were Carl Ferrer, you'd be thinking, "the prosecutors are going to show the jury a bunch of ads depicting children known to have been trafficked, with evidence that we knowingly massaged the ad to ensure it could be published for our profit".
Public forums are a goldmine for identifying people who have compromising or plain illegal perversions. A rich and diverse source for both buying and selling perversions. Of course she and Epstein and others were using deep access to this site to their advantage. Like wolves to sheep.
You clearly have not read the article, specially this part:
The trafficker was caught and given five years in jail,
but the explicit photos of MA remained online. “I called
Backpage dozens of times asking them to take down those
photos, that my daughter was just a child and that what
had been done to her was a crime,” says Kubiiki. “They
refused and said if I didn’t pay for it, they couldn’t
take it down. In the end they just stopped returning
my calls.”
I used to take down pedofile rings online with a few associates. This was strictly a black hat endeavor and I never had to look at anything. My motivation was that its fun to use these skills to ruin someones day (or life in this case) but it's only really moral to do these sort of things against people like that.
I once found a confirmed child porn possessing target with a smart home I was able to access. That guy must of thought he was in a black mirror episode.
I’ve unfortunately seen far too much of what people don’t believe is out there. That’s what I get for helping anons “dig”. As they say “nothing is beyond our reach”.
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