General Reports

[James D 2004]

Before FOSTA, I didn't use VPNs for posting (but other purposes). If you posted on USG back then, you would be a needle in a haystack. Why would they single you out? The Seattle case is different. The whole thing is interconnected. If a person is convicted only because they wrote a review and nothing else, no IRL meeting, no phone communications, how many were convicted that way?

After FOSTA, the site owner is in trouble rather than just the posters. They are either squeaky clean or moved to where they don't have to respond to LE for anything, no logs.

For the history of CA, you only get busted if you go inside an MP and say the wrong things in a sting. If they only have your license plate they can't prove anything.

PM is from one person to another. As long as you don't say anything illegal you are fine. For HX you don't need to say anything as the menu is clear. You call another number anyway. They have to get your PM, and / or your phone messages, and then prove that you were there. It's easier just to set up a sting to get everything.

Now if you need to be interviewed face to face to join a league, you are indeed joining an illegal gang.

[Taliesin92]

Using VPN's or Tor clients, is not proof of anything.

Of course you are right. But that didn't stop the prosecution from telling the jury only a criminal would use a VPN.

The defense objects.

The judge overrules.

And the case continues with that idea planted in the jury's head.

I've read some of the articles from the media. Definitely, a difference of opinions. I believe, only 1 fellow decided to not take the plea offer and went to trial.

That's correct. Only Peters went to trial. But there's lots of interesting information to be learned from the other cases, as well. The guys who took plea deals still had to go to court, so their stories are also contained in the court documents. They were told, take a plea deal, admit your crime, and you will only be charged with one felony. Most of them avoided prison time that way. But they still had to plead guilty to a felony that will be on their record forever. For many of them, it ruined their careers. Having a felony on your record makes it very difficult to find employment anywhere else.

Most of us, have good reasons not to challenge in court. Could be, simply and most likely, not having the funds to challenge it. The one guy that did take prosecution to task, but seems to have lost, must have had some of the funding, but not enough to carry it thru the various appeals courts. I suspect, eventually a higher court would find issues, but that takes money and time.

Nope. Peters did appeal. And he lost there, too. He was railroaded throughout the entire legal system.

What Taliesin92 mentions, use the tools available at this time, avoid disclosing private information. It will be difficult to explain how a copy of your Drivers License should up in the agencies cache of information. It will be difficult to explain, why they have a copy of your paystub. Of course, you can change details on either document to obscure the disclosure. Use VPNs as practical, use burners as much as one can. Be certain, although very inconvenient, paying for those burners and their credits using cash. Today with all the surveillance in retail stores, it might be challenging to completely insulate oneself from 100% discovery, but one can make it challenging enough that LE just moves along to the next easier person to get to.

Exactly. That's all I've been saying since this conversation started. We can all take steps to protect ourselves. So why not do it? Sure, there is a good chance you will never get caught up in something as ridiculous and corrupt as the 2016 Seattle case. But what if it does happen to you? What if you are one of those unlucky souls? In that case, you will want to have taken every reasonable step to protect your identity and your privacy. The Seattle case shows how far some law enforcement agencies are willing to go to ruin our lives. Hopefully, nothing like that will ever happen again. But, as a former Boy Scout, I prefer to "be prepared. " Just in case.

Who knows. You might still get caught anyway. But why make it easy for them? Make them jump over a few hurdles before finding you.

[Ace McNasty]

Cautionary lore. Turns out these AMP and K-connoiseurs are so very, very ordinary after all. Book of Proverbs 16:18.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

[Taliesin92]

If they were using VPN, did their emails have PII? Did the KC go to the VPN providers, get the logs, match the home IP addresses against the VPN then against the IP's on the email providers?

This is the thing that gets me. Let's say you never hobby in Washington state, but you got off on writing explicit reviews. How is that any different than Penthouse forum letters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the 1st Amendment. At that point you would hope the ACLU would step in and fight for you.

Yup, non-encrypted emails do have information embedded in them that allows them to be traced, and that did happen. Google's Gmail is the worst. Google will give up everything to law enforcement at a moment's notice. ProtonMail is the way to go.

VPNs: The guys who were tech savvy, using VPNs and other security tools, were tracked down in other ways. VPNs did protect them for a while. But at least one guy made a mistake and logged into a hobby-related site using hotel Wi-Fi. Law enforcement was able to find him by contacting the hotel and asking who was in that hotel room at the time. Since he had to pay for the hotel room with a credit card, that's how they identified him. They might not have found him if it wasn't for that one mistake.

First Amendment: Yeah, that was my initial thought when this case first broke in January 2016. I thought it would all be thrown of court on First Amendment grounds, especially the felony charges for writing reviews ("promoting prostitution" But nope. That's not what happened. Defense attorneys weren't even allowed to bring up a First Amendment argument during Peters' initial trial. Astoundingly, the judge said it was irrelevant to the case. The defense did bring it up on appeal, and the argument was rejected. As I said before, this was very clearly a case where the outcome was decided long before it ever got to a courtroom. From day one, the decision was made to railroad these men, and that's exactly what happened.

The ACLU of 30 years ago might have come to their defense. But not today's ACLU. The ACLU of today is a joke. They don't believe in civil liberties anymore.

[Oc Amper]

Even if you take all the precautions while visiting an AAMP, when you visit an AMP, you are very exposed. It's challenging to arrive by public transportation to any AMP, which means you probably arrived via your own personal vehicle.

Needless to say, arriving in your personal vehicle, it is trivial to very accurately or extremely narrow the field of possible suspects you might be. You could use a company vehicle, but that is just as bad, or probably worse than using a personal vehicle. With personal, all that can happen is a divorce, but you might retain your job. Company vehicle, unless you have one cool ass boss and a small company, you are likely fired very quickly for multiple reasons.

Although, I can only go by media reports, there seems to be very few recorded incidents where a customer is tracked down via license plate when visiting a AMP. Few cities have been as interested as Bellevue in going after the customers. That, seems to a fact, only by absence of news articles to the contrary.

[Oc Amper]

One other thing I forgot to note: Some of the guys who got busted in the Seattle case were very tech savvy. They used VPNs and other tools to protect their privacy. Guess what the prosecution said about that? They claimed using a VPN is proof that you are doing something illegal. So, as absurd as that statement is (given that nearly everyone in the corporate world uses VPNs to protect their company's internet traffic) the jury was told that using a VPN means you are a criminal.

On the flip side, a lot of the guys didn't use VPNs, so it was even easier to find them. But, either way, the prosecution turned that into a lose-lose situation for the men involved.

The only way to protect yourself from that kind of prosecutorial overreach is to lay low, use all security tools available to you, don't ever reveal your real name to anyone in the pay-for-play world (not the agencies, not the bookers, not the ladies, not your buddies, not anyone). Fly below the radar as much as possible and HOPE you never get caught up in a nightmare like the Seattle case, or the more recent cases in Boston and Virginia.

Using VPN's or Tor clients, is not proof of anything. I've read some of the articles from the media. Definitely, a difference of opinions. I believe, only 1 fellow decided to not take the plea offer and went to trial.

Prosecution can use that thinking. Most of us, have good reasons not to challenge in court. Could be, simply and most likely, not having the funds to challenge it. The one guy that did take prosecution to task, but seems to have lost, must have had some of the funding, but not enough to carry it / thru the various appeals courts. I suspect, eventually a higher court would find issues, but that takes money and time.

I think, we all know, there is a level of risk in this activity. Mostly, the risk is low, unless one becomes one of the more prominent users. Prosecution only has so much time to pursue the case, not like they will pursue 1000's of people. They simply don't have the budget for such a pursuit.

One thing I did learn, VPN's do boast and are audited for No Logging. Casually, I looked into this, it seems they don't log the traffic that the user generates. So, basically no list of URL's that the user visited at any time. They run the servers in RAM, and probably reboot those servers on a semi-frequent basis to prevent any storage of data, and any that might be stored gets destroyed upon reboot.

They do conduct audits, from 3rd party auditors / accountant firms.

What Taliesin92 mentions, use the tools available at this time, avoid disclosing private information. It will be difficult to explain how a copy of your Drivers License should up in the agencies cache of information. It will be difficult to explain, why they have a copy of your paystub. Of course, you can change details on either document to obscure the disclosure. Use VPNs as practical, use burners as much as one can. Be certain, although very inconvenient, paying for those burners and their credits using cash. Today with all the surveillance in retail stores, it might be challenging to completely insulate oneself from 100% discovery, but one can make it challenging enough that LE just moves along to the next easier person to get to.

[TapDisBong]

One other thing I forgot to note: Some of the guys who got busted in the Seattle case were very tech savvy. They used VPNs and other tools to protect their privacy. Guess what the prosecution said about that? They claimed using a VPN is proof that you are doing something illegal. So, as absurd as that statement is (given that nearly everyone in the corporate world uses VPNs to protect their company's internet traffic) the jury was told that using a VPN means you are a criminal.

On the flip side, a lot of the guys didn't use VPNs, so it was even easier to find them. But, either way, the prosecution turned that into a lose-lose situation for the men involved.

The only way to protect yourself from that kind of prosecutorial overreach is to lay low, use all security tools available to you, don't ever reveal your real name to anyone in the pay-for-play world (not the agencies, not the bookers, not the ladies, not your buddies, not anyone). Fly below the radar as much as possible and HOPE you never get caught up in a nightmare like the Seattle case, or the more recent cases in Boston and Virginia.

If they were using VPN, did their emails have PII? Did the KC go to the VPN providers, get the logs, match the home IP addresses against the VPN then against the IP's on the email providers?

This is the thing that gets me. Let's say you never hobby in Washington state, but you got off on writing explicit reviews. How is that any different than Penthouse forum letters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the 1st Amendment. At that point you would hope the ACLU would step in and fight for you.

[Taliesin92]

One other thing I forgot to note: Some of the guys who got busted in the Seattle case were very tech savvy. They used VPNs and other tools to protect their privacy. Guess what the prosecution said about that? They claimed using a VPN is proof that you are doing something illegal. So, as absurd as that statement is (given that nearly everyone in the corporate world uses VPNs to protect their company's internet traffic) the jury was told that using a VPN means you are a criminal.

On the flip side, a lot of the guys didn't use VPNs, so it was even easier to find them. But, either way, the prosecution turned that into a lose-lose situation for the men involved.

The only way to protect yourself from that kind of prosecutorial overreach is to lay low, use all security tools available to you, don't ever reveal your real name to anyone in the pay-for-play world (not the agencies, not the bookers, not the ladies, not your buddies, not anyone). Fly below the radar as much as possible and HOPE you never get caught up in a nightmare like the Seattle case, or the more recent cases in Boston and Virginia.

[Taliesin92]

From what I can tell, let's look at some factors that allowed the government to pinch these guys: They didn't protect their PII at all. Suppose you're not using a "no-logs" VPN (preferably one you pay for that doesn't collect your info (mullvad comes to mind); you aren't safe. If you use the same username across all the sites for hookers, you aren't being safe. If you don't use a private email service like Protonmail, you aren't being safe. If you're doing public meetups in bars and loudly discussing your hooker hobbies, you aren't being safe. Banging hookers isn't a team sport, IMO, at least in the US.

Yeah, that's mostly true. But one thing to keep in mind: All of these guys thought, at the very worst, they were committing minor misdemeanors. Something akin to a speeding ticket. Not major felonies with the potential for YEARS in prison. So, of course, at the time, many of them did not take the important steps they should have taken to protect themselves. (Which is how this whole discussion started a few weeks ago -- when I and others argued that you should protect yourself as much as possible.).

That said, the Seattle case IS the reason many mongers now use all of these internet security tools and don't attend dinners with large groups of other mongers anymore. Before that case, we all thought we were dealing with a relatively fair legal system that wouldn't over-charge people based on ideological beliefs (as well as a naked desire to further their political careers). But that's exactly what happened in Seattle. The authorities took everything to a whole new level, which is why we all need to be super vigilant and protect ourselves accordingly.

As I've always said: You are not being paranoid if they really are out to get you.

[FarFarAway]

There is no safe sex / STD thread for SoCal, so.

Lots of general talk on here advising guys to get the HPV vaccine (if eligible. Up to 45 YO). There was just an editorial in the LA Times about a dude whose wife had HPV on her tonsil. Sad, as most cancer stories are, but she is alive. However, most of the throat HPV one hears about are guys who got it by DATY (such as Michael Douglas). I guess that gal subject was a guzzler.

[TapDisBong]

Oh, forgot to mention. The site has a size limit on attachments, so that is likely the issue with not being able to upload.

I broke them up to get them under the file size limitation. If you want to read them, you can DM me and I'll send you a link.

[Oc Amper]

I tried it didn't work. Oh well. It's all on King County's court website. You just have to pay for it.

Anyway, LE had already compromised TRB's servers. The main cop, L. H*m* basically conjured up the idea of using Washington's promoting laws as a way to bust mongers. I don't know how Seattle became a target of crazy feminists, but it sure did work considering there's nobody paying for fucking in Seattle anymore.

Oh, forgot to mention. The site has a size limit on attachments, so that is likely the issue with not being able to upload.

[TapDisBong]

I tried it didn't work. Oh well. It's all on King County's court website. You just have to pay for it.

Anyway, LE had already compromised TRB's servers. The main cop, L. H*m* basically conjured up the idea of using Washington's promoting laws as a way to bust mongers. I don't know how Seattle became a target of crazy feminists, but it sure did work considering there's nobody paying for fucking in Seattle anymore.

Admin will correct me if I'm wrong, the posting guidelines state a several restrictions including.

Please DO NOT post arrest or incarceration reports about any private individual. (Reports and links to media stories about LE activities are acceptable).

Please REDACT names and address numbers from posted copies of media reports. (Please use "XXXXXXXXXX" to blank out names and address numbers).

I'd assume court records would fall under the spirit of arrest / incarceration reports. You could redact the names and it seems like that would follow the spirit of the restrictions. Maybe admin could clarify.

[Oc Amper]

I don't know if I ever read or heard anything from the mainstream media that didn't parrot the press releases that were written by Demand Abolition including Sheriff Urqhuart's initial press conference. Here are some articles written by the alternative media that revealed the truth.

https://archive.ph/raKzb

https://www.thestranger.com/news/201...-attorneys-say

https://www.thestranger.com/news/201...titution-group

While the Seattle was being overrun by homeless and police not responding to property crime, the cops were busy spending money fucking providers to gather evidence and setting up fake massage parlors to nab immigrants on prostitution charges.

LOL, the 2nd URL, dire consequences for immigrants. $100 HJ, $140 BJ's, and $200 bangin'. Not sure of Seattle pricing, but sure seems like they saw these johns cumming a mile away. Those prices, I think only Vegas, because of either being drunk, or assumed having won free money. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

[TapDisBong]

I don't know if I ever read or heard anything from the mainstream media that didn't parrot the press releases that were written by Demand Abolition including Sheriff Urqhuart's initial press conference. Here are some articles written by the alternative media that revealed the truth.

https://archive.ph/raKzb

https://www.thestranger.com/news/201...-attorneys-say

https://www.thestranger.com/news/201...titution-group

While the Seattle was being overrun by homeless and police not responding to property crime, the cops were busy spending money fucking providers to gather evidence and setting up fake massage parlors to nab immigrants on prostitution charges.

Yes! It's great to see a post from someone who knows the facts of the case. The Swanee Hunt angle was another totally insane aspect of this shitshow. She was paying to impose her brand of "justice" on men because her own father a wealthy Texas oil man was a frequent monger himself. In what world is THAT legal? She should have been thrown in jail herself, along with the King County prosecutors who took her money and promptly followed her orders.

The Associated Press wrote about it. I'm trying to find that article now because I know most guys here won't believe that actually happened. But it did.