November 22, 2006 | Sex & Society

Police sting Craigslist Johns

Bicycles. Clothes. Jobs. Apartments. You can find just about anything on Craigslist -- even sex partners (free and paid for). Recently Seattle police twigged on to the online hooking and set up a phony escort service with the immensely popular classifieds website. The result: 104 men were arrested after answering ads for "erotic services."

Seattle vice detectives spent two weeks last month making dates with men who wanted to pay for sex, according to The Seattle Times. Nearly 75 percent of those men were found via Craigslist, while the remainder had answered escort ads in local newspapers.

"We wanted to prove Craigslist was in fact a vehicle for promoting prostitution," Lt. Eric Sano, commander of the Seattle Police Department's vice unit, told the Times, adding that his department aims to expose the escort industry -- which claims to sell the platonic companionship of female dates -- as a front for prostitution.

Police claim to have discovered on Craigslist an entire "subculture" of prostitutes and Johns that have their own language, websites and networks. And while Craigslist acknowledges the potential for illegal activity on its website, it says it does not condone it.

"We are a democracy ... and we find we can trust our community," Craigslist founder Craig Newmark told the Times in response to the Seattle sting. "I don't know what the situation is like in Seattle, but we would prefer that [police] go after violent criminals or crooked congressmen."

"We're going to do this again and again and again," Officer Sano promised, "so these guys will never know when we're going to do it."

The Seattle sting should set the alarm bells ringing for anyone who uses escort websites in jurisdictions where soliciting for the purposes of prostitution is illegal (and where the police have nothing better to do). Sex buyers beware: the hot boy you're arranging to meet just could be cop.

• Prostitution sting leads to 104 arrests [The Seattle Times]
• Ad on Craigslist really a sex sting [Seattle PI]