I certainly don't know many of the details of the OFC operation, but I was surprised to see how fast and easily the escorts and guys caved in and cooperated with LE, even to the point of trying to "out" as many other people as possible.
In my city there are escorts who know the full name of other escorts and even know where they live. That's astonishing to know that much personal information about someone in a hobby that is not exactly legal.
I think these girls are naive and I wonder if their loose lips apply to client names as well...and after reading some of the OFC docuements, I wonder if these girls would break down at the first sign of pressure from a sting.
So, for me, reading some of the OFC documents was a real eye-opener.
Operation Flea Collar was a Florida racketeering and prostitution prosecution againt the owner of the Bigdoggie.net messageboard as well as many escorts. In that case, a number of hobbyists who posted on the Bigdoggie messageboards, as well as a number of escorts, agreed to cooperate with law enforcement to identify and describe the escorts and clients with whom they allegedly had had sex for money. This formed the basis of the felony racketeering charges brought against other escorts as well as the owner of the board. The case was eventually dismissed because the prosecution refused to reveal the identity of the hobbyist informants. 90 percent of the prostitution prosecutions in the US are against escorts. This case illustrates how far LE will go to protect some "johns" from embarrasment.
This site provides many if not all the legal documents from that case, including witness statements and emails between informants and LE. A good sampling of the docs are free, but to see the rest you must pay a fee. It serves as a cautionary lesson about why we should be careful who we associate with, and how easy it is for some client (or escort) to turn against an associate who was claimed as a friend and act dishonorably. In many cases it appears that the clients and escorts agreed to finger as many persons as they could in order to escape what was at most probably a misdemeanor charge and public embarrasment.
The link was banned from the TBD site. I suspect because of threats from the "john" informants whose names are revealed or perhaps because it casts a unsavory shadow on the site. I don't know if I would pay the subscription price, but there are some very informative docs available for free.
http://www.operationfleacollar.info/
just limited to the "1st ammendment" section of their board to keep it from becoming a flame-war starter on a bunch of boards. However, that site has long had a policy against linking to pay sites - the rule was targeted at stopping people linking to for-pay porn sites to cut down on spam, but the rule has been applied to many other types of pay sites (including individual escort sites that are wholy or mostly "for-pay" sites) and was applied here as well.
about linking to pay sites is just an excuse. I think revealing the details of the prosecution and real identities of the "johns" and escorts who cooperated with LE is just too sensitive and scary for the current management of TBD.
I can only guess that the past and continued flaming and outcry comes from those escorts and johns who acted poorly.
on the excuse part. Perhaps I'm dense, but I fail to see how linking to the OFC site puts the new TBD owner, who AFAIK had nothing to do with OFC, at any substantial risk beyond what already exists simply from running this sort of board. (If I was going to run such a site, I damn sure would not do so on servers hosted in this country.)
I would definitely agree on you last statement.
I certainly don't know many of the details of the OFC operation, but I was surprised to see how fast and easily the escorts and guys caved in and cooperated with LE, even to the point of trying to "out" as many other people as possible.
In my city there are escorts who know the full name of other escorts and even know where they live. That's astonishing to know that much personal information about someone in a hobby that is not exactly legal.
I think these girls are naive and I wonder if their loose lips apply to client names as well...and after reading some of the OFC docuements, I wonder if these girls would break down at the first sign of pressure from a sting.
So, for me, reading some of the OFC documents was a real eye-opener.