I saw a post in the "erotic services" corner of CL that described a college girl who was looking to exchange tuition and fees help in return for, well, you know.  (It wasn't spelled out, but of course, sex.)

I wrote to the person and we've been chatting back and forth for a day or so.

While people say that they'd put nothing past LE these days, would they waste their time cultivating chat online?  I would think it would be the most bang for the buck - get a guy who wants to meet right away and then "take care of him" rather than go on and on in e-mail first.  

I have, of course, seen guys posting reverse of such ads - looking to help a college girl.  I wonder what kind of responses they get.

Everyone seems to have forgotten Operation Flea Collar in Florida 2002.  LE spent most of a year cultivating leads.  They tracked providers and clients by their emails resolved to the isp and user physical address.  They went through trash cans and reconstructed notes.  They wrote down auto tag numbers at meet and greets and determined who the owners were.  They subpoenaed apparantly innocent documents completely unrelated to the adult industry.  They posted fake escort ads.  They turned clients into informants.  They turned escorts into informants.  Clients and escorts were incredibly careless which made it even easier.  The amount of time and money spent was unbelievable.  So if your question is "would they waste their time?"  The answer is YES!  All of this is public record.  Do an internet search.

well if she's a college girl and not a pro, she might actually want to get to know you so she can sleep at night.

It's still pay for play, even if it's for books and tuition.  If this is really interesting to you, I'd meet for a cup of coffee first and scope out the situation.

An ambitious effort by LE to take down TBD, which resulted in no convictions!

I'm not saying that major stings don't happen, but given the limited impact to resources ratio, when LE tries something online, they focus on the the cheap and easy wins!

They screwed up a lot of people's lives and yes, there were related convictions.

They did essentially the same thing last winter in Orange County.

It was the news story of the day.  A "task force" spent 3 YEARS investigating I think it was 9 massage parlours.

Touted as the "biggest prostitution bust in OC history" which ultimately resulted in 6 arrests at least one of which was a misdemeanor.

In 3 YEARS... I hope the investigators got a lot of f/s massages at county expense.

Sheesh,
TS Jamie