Last week, U.S. District Judge John J. Tharp. Jr granted Backpage.com a restraining order against a Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart, in response to his effort to win agreement from Visa and Mastercard to immediately cut off all association with the sie’s so-called ‘adult’ section and its less prominent imitators.
According to the Washington Times, Chicago lawyer Christopher F. Allen and colleagues said in a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, claiming that the Sheriff “engaged in an “informal extralegal” effort to get Backpage.com to shut down its portions of its website for “adult-oriented ads posted by users.”
In June, Sheriff Dart wrote to Visa CEO Charles Scharf and MasterCard CEO Ajaypal Banga to brief them on the role their companies played within the sex trafficking industry. By Tuesday afternoon, MasterCard agreed to disassociate itself from Backpage, with Visa following suit Wednesday morning.
Such ads – millions of them posted a year – make up the foundation of a booming modern sex trafficking industry, in which often minors are sold. It is a violent business that preys on the young and vulnerable, yet one that hides that reality behind a sense of normalcy created by sites like Backpage.com, according to Dart.
As we reported earlier, sex traffickers seeking to advertise women under their control on Backpage pay anywhere from $5 to $17 per initial ad, depending on the size of the market. Prices can easily run into the hundreds of dollars with add-on features. With Visa and MasterCard’s move, there is now just one payment option for adult ads on Backpage: Bitcoin.
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In 2012, Backpage.com owned and operated by the Village Voice Media group, was the implicated in a large scale prostitution bust that came as a result of an undercover drug operation that concluded with the arrests of 51 suspects for various crimes from prostitution, drug possession, identity theft, weapons charges and attempted murder. The months long investigation discovered that the connection between prostitute and customer came almost exclusively from advertisements in Backpage.com.