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Backpage Founders Charged With Money Laundering, Aiding Prostitution (theverge.com)
Federal authorities have charged the two founders of classified site Backpage.com, along with five other employees, with laundering money and facilitating prostitution. According to The Washington Post, the Justice Department claims Backpage took "consistent and concerted action" to knowingly allow ads for illegal sex work. The indictment alleges that "virtually every dollar flowing into Backpage's coffers represents the proceeds of illegal activity." The Verge reports: Law enforcement agencies seized Backpage's servers last week, and co-founder Michael Lacey was charged in a sealed 93-count indictment, which has now been revealed. Lacey, as well as his co-founder James Larkin, were already charged with violating California money laundering laws, although a judge threw out state-level pimping charges. Beyond Lacey and Larkin, the Backpage indictment includes charges against the site's chief financial officer, operations manager, assistant operations manager, and marketing director. It also charges the executive vice president of one of Backpage's parent companies. Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer, who was previously charged with pimping in California, was not charged in this indictment. The Justice Department claims Backpage's owners tried to cover up the fact that most of its "adult services" ads involved prostitution, and that Backpage allowed child sex traffickers to keep ads on the site as long as they deleted age-related keywords. The indictment also claims that Backpage disguised payments for illegal services by having customers funnel money to foreign bank accounts or apparently unrelated companies, or by transferring funds into cryptocurrency. These federal chargers are reportedly unrelated to the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, a bill that would make website operators liable for illegal content posted to their sites. The bill is currently awaiting Trump's signature.
better plea down, because at least one of the indicted will 'turn', and examples will be made.
Prostitution and money laundering? Whelp, they're fucked.
Money laundering: bad
Child sex trafficking: bad
Prostitution: not bad. Get with the times USA, It's legal elsewhere.
The prosecutors want to claim that the Back Page people were enabling the exploitation of children, but it is regressive laws on prostitution that allow abuse of sex workers in the black market.
When is our society going to crawl out of the dark ages and provide a safe workplace for sex workers? It is only when the trade is out in the open that people who exploit others can be removed through laws that protect sex workers instead of marginalizing them.
Back Page was actually providing a way for sex workers to operate without criminals managing them.
No, you should see Backpage.... Oh wait, they're gone, so now you'll have to buy some meth and put a sentence that includes the words "go fast" in a personal ad.
So where is the first amendment protection exactly? The right to free speech is destroyed by the government completely, the right to free association, the basic idea that you own your body, your property, your labour, all of it is absolutely destroyed and this shit started back in the early 1900s when the Sherman act was passed, when the income taxes were set up, when the gold dollar was turned into paper, all of this crap led to this total destruction of individual rights and liberties.
Where is the freedom, freedom to do anything at all that humans should be able to do on this planet? We live once, only one fucking time. There is no fucking god, there is no fucking afterlife, there is no fucking anything after you are dead, you live once and the so called 'society' is a prison and the government is the warden and the cops and the military are the jailers, prison guards.
There is no freedom, there is nothing left, the money is fake, the economy is fake, the Constitution is fake, the society is fake, the judges are fake, the laws are fake.
A woman or a man (and anything in between) must be able to sell their labour, their services, whatever those services must be. They must be able to keep the fruits of their labour without any society infringing upon these rights that should be protected simply because it makes sense to protect those rights for others so that your rights can be protected too.
Rights are not something somebody gives to you, it is what the oppression cannot take away that you created or provided.
WHO WANTS THESE LAWS? Which ones of you are actually for this shit, I want to know?
You can't handle the truth.
They also forced down Preferred411, the site that reviewed sex workers and verified the johns. The site kept things safer for everyone - the customers got to avoid scams and muggings, while the girls could verify their clients weren't psychopaths or serial killers.
Now it's much worse for everybody, don't be surprised if violent crime goes up. Thanks for saving us politicians.
I suppose such confessions are properly meant to be reported to the FBI. That will teach brothels to remove age-related words anyway and then BackPage won't know that underage prostitutes are advertised on their site.
This propaganda, commonly used in the USA, is another way of saying it's Backpage's fault their customers committed a crime.
So they've charged them with various crimes, and a jury may or may not convict them. But the trial hasn't happened yet - what right does the government have to take down their website and business just in case they get a conviction? Isn't the whole point of "innocent until proven guilty" that you get your day in court before any punishment happens?
On the one hand, politicians have had it out for Craigslist and Backpage for pretty much ever... On the other hand, I haven't seen any of the evidence, or read the complaint, but with 93-counts, odds are they've got something more than a political axe to grind.
Only if it persists for more than four hours, or if you already have an affair with the doctor.
Ezekiel 23:20
What the fuck does this mean for Adult Friend Finder, Tinder, Grindr, and/or fuckfest.cum?
fucking stoopid.
u
Police are reaching out:
https://www.shouselaw.com/supervising-aiding-prostitute.html
Backpages was not pimps
One year I fucked 6 women within 4 months. I wish we had this around when I was in the 5th grade.
This case is a big fuck you to the first amendment. Yea their business model involved allowing a site where prostitutes could advertise their services. But that's called free speech, either we have it or don't. To try to force on them the charges for people posting on the site is a broad overreach and attempt to punish a website owner for the actions and speech of others.
I hope to god these guys can afford good lawyers and get this case thrown out for the broad overreach that it is. Talk about a political prosecution, congress punched a hole in the law to target these guys, a hole that's going to be used to go after a hell of a lot more site operators.
Everyone should be shocked by what the Trump administration and Congress is doing here.
It's more like the feds raid some organized crime boss' Italian restaurant and shut it down because gangsters hung out there. The business itself hasn't been declared illegal.
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How bogus can this be? Whaddya think the republican and democrat national committees do? In fact that is their singular function. What bullshit! Every goddamn 503(c) is a money laundering operation. That's what 503(c) means!
There are lots of places to defend violated civil liberties. This isn't one of them.
So they've charged them with various crimes, and a jury may or may not convict them. But the trial hasn't happened yet - what right does the government have to take down their website and business just in case they get a conviction?
Every right. They shall not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. But "due process" is just "the process that is due under the circumstances." If I see you shooting your wife, I can lock you up even though you haven't been tried yet. That doesn't mean I have to let you out to shoot your neighbor until you get a trial.
Isn't the whole point of "innocent until proven guilty" that you get your day in court before any punishment happens?
No. "Innocent until proven guilty" is also a presumption, not a fact--courts don't find people innocent, they find people "not guilty," which does NOT mean they're innocent. It just means that either the state failed to make their case or the jury wasn't listening. Juries don't always pay attention. Occasionally a person is actually innocent. The system is very bad about helping people who are actually innocent.
The point of innocent until proven guilty is basically the intuitive belief that it is better to have ten guilty men go free than to send one innocent man to prison. Effectively, we have a very strong belief that people should never be sent to prison unless they are actually guilty. (We are either "retributivists" or "side-constrained consequentialists," but the side-constraint of "must actually be guilty" is there for pretty much everyone.) But it's not an absolute prohibition on denials of life, liberty, or property, because you can't just let people go around murdering or stealing or money laundering while you're waiting for the trial.
Most or all of the people in this story are guilty, with an extremely high degree of probability. In the process of getting rich off of a massive criminal conspiracy, they got kids raped. They're lucky they're not put up against a wall and shot.
Real lawyers write in C++
it's not free speech when it's a crime. That's called 'aiding and abetting'.
That said, Trump was elected partly by the evangelicals. This is him doing the bidding of those folks. So you're right, we shouldn't be surprised. Though I am a bit surprised how much power evangelicals wield in 2018, especially given how small a percentage of the population they are...
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What they have been charged with is facilitating consensual acts between adults. Not enabling pedophiles (whom they appear to have been reporting to authorities) or "human trafficking." Congratulations idiots, you've really struck a blow against actual pedophiles and child traffickers by pushing their activities outside the margins of visibility where the Bill's and Hillary's (and Epsteins) can operate unimpeded by public scrutiny.
Earth is a single point of failure.
god dammit, this is what happens because /r/thedonald was shut down.
.. the way it is today, this is it. This is what a theocracy looks like in its infancy. Be afraid, my fellow humans, and fight while you have the opportunity.
30 years passes in the blink of an eye.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Make corrupt politicians sleep in ditches. Set an example to them by leaving the bodies in the swamp.
I work as a high class escort in the UK. I'm somewhat puzzled by the US as it is a very appearance and sex driven country while being incredibly puritanical.
The UK legal position is that Parliament lacks the power in common law, on which the authority of Parliament is based, to pass a law outlawing prositution. The worst Parliament can do is outlaw lots of activities relating to prostitution. The evidence is mounting that not only are current laws harmful but serve no real purpose other than to make a lawful activity more difficult.
UK sex trafficking law is incompatible with EU single market law because it bans a prosititute offering services across borders.
One of the advertising sites I am signed up with is UK owned and actually based in Russia of all places simply to avoid prosecuting abuses. To avoid impersonation and sex trafficing the site has identity and age verification measures in place. While the majority of escorts are UK citizens a proportion are American or Asian.
If a client abused me there is nothing stopping me visiting the police and reporting this, and there are community produced alert systems in place to warn of abusive clients.
I am more than happy to take Americans money, and generally enjoy the company of American men, so if Americans visit the UK on holiday or business and decide on the spur of the moment they want to fuck me I'm not protesting. I live close to motorway and rail and airport links and can get to your hotel within half an hour or quicker if need be, or you can visit for tea before we make our way to the bedroom and I spread myself semi-naked on my bed for you. For the right client we can negotiate reasonable rates for a special traveller package of a few days or even a week of intimacy.
If this tickles your fancy gimme a call.
Can you read, the child accusations were thrown out?
Give him some charitable service or else he will outlaw cars, prostitution and peeling knives.
Can you point me to that? The summary says that the state-level pimping charges were thrown out, there are still a ton of indictments left, including ones at the federal level. I see nothing that leads me to conclude that they don't still stand accused of this.
From wikipedia:
On October 6, 2016, Harris announced the arrest of Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer on felony charges of pimping a minor, pimping, and conspiracy to commit pimping. The arrest warrant alleged that 99% of Backpage's revenue was directly attributable to prostitution-related ads, many of which involved victims of sex trafficking, including children under the age of 18.[107]
On December 9, 2016, a superior court judge dismissed all charges in the complaint.[108] On December 23, 2016, Harris filed new charges against Ferrer and former Backpage owners Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin for pimping and money laundering.[109] In January 2017, Backpage announced that it was removing its adult section from all of its sites in the United States due to many years of harassment and extralegal tactics.[110][111] ... I wonder if they've learnt from the takedown and prosecution of sfredbook about how to "get these guys"?
There seems to be a lot of news regarding backpage going on here? Is this because Slashdot is somehow associated with backpage or that Slashdot is a resource considered highly valued by Slashdot readers?
I donâ(TM)t think Iâ(TM)ve even heard of backpage in 10 years. And back then it was because backpage would show up for some weird results like âoecookie recipesâ on google.
One of the key points is that the site serviced a broad base of sex workers, the majority of which were not children nor being trafficked. The claim that the site worked to help child sex slavers is a bit like claiming uber is helping uber drivers assault passengers. It happens, and the company should probably be doing more to stop it, but it isn't something they are trying for.
If sex trafficking on Backpage was so rampant, why was the back page founder not actually charged with sex trafficking?
What sources do you have to prove this? Yes there were a lot of ads for sex on Backpage, but how many of them were really trafficking? There are a lot of perfectly independent sex workers these days.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Still available for me
Prostitution among consenting adults should be legal.
You'd best not mess with the sestas or Helena will open up a can of crazy bitch whoop-ass on yo' ass!
This is such bullshit. Craigslist does the same thing, it's just listed in different sections.
The same thing appears in newspapers.
Puritanical extremism. This will not protect the anything, just get some cheap votes.
Idiots.
“Or, Mike, take the firearms first and then go to court,” Trump said. “You could do exactly what you’re saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.”
~ Donald Trump
George Carlin said it best, of all the things you can to do someone, is giving them an organism really the worst?
Chris' case is getting worse, he spends all day replying to himself as AC on /. and now, on YouTube in order to grab attention!
The tests we ran on Chris have shown that Chris has the intelligence of an ameba:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, technically, he is able to conceive some kind of agenda but it will be silly or impossible to follow on a human scale.
For example, Chris had an agenda to post anything he felt like on Slashdot which did not work well because it was based on his false beliefs that he had an infinite number of karma points as he wrote here several times.
Several people here explained to Chris that karma maxed out at some level like 50 or so but Chris kept on insisting that his python script had confirmed that he had millions of karma points!
Oh well, as I wrote before: "It isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody."
For the valuable /. users that might already have read the following, please note that there is an important update.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education has invested money to buy Chris a new chair:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...
Information about Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:
Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.
To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.
The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!
Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.
I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...
Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
http://ibb.co/mRVSaG
But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.
Thank You dear users,
---
Nancy Guerrero
Director
Special Education
Santa Clara County Office of Education
You sound bitter, nipple dick.