$215 million to be forfeited to U.S. in Backpage.com settlement for sex work ads, feds in CA say
About $215 million in assets stemming from profits made by Backpage.com — the website shuttered by federal authorities for sex work ads which included depictions of children — will be forfeited to the U.S. government as part of a settlement in the case, according to federal prosecutors in Southern California.
Three former operators of the site, which has been described by prosecutors as an "online brothel," were sentenced to prison in August, more than seven years after the website shut down the "adult" section of its website following a scathing Senate report. According to federal prosecutors, Michael Lacey, Scott Spear and John "Jed" Brunst knowingly marketed the illegal ads and earned hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of the 14 years the website was up.
"The defendants and their conspirators obtained more than $500 million from operating an online forum that facilitated the sexual exploitation of countless victims," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, said in a statement from the DOJ announcing the sentences for the three Arizona men earlier this year.
They were sentenced following the convictions of others involved in running the website. Back in 2018, former Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer pleaded guilty to state and federal charges of conspiracy and money laundering as part of a deal with prosecutors in which he agreed to testify against other defendants in the case and serve no more than five years in prison.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California said $215 million in former assets of Backpage.com — which include cryptocurrency, cash and some real estate in San Francisco — will be forfeited to the U.S. government. Federal prosecutors said that amount consists of more than 80% of the estimated value of the property seized or restrained.
"For most of its 14-year existence, Backpage dominated the online market for illegal sex work advertising in the United States," reads the statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.
The classifieds website was founded in 2004 by the alternative newspaper company now known as Village Voice Media.
It acted as a sort of rival to Craigslist, which told Congress in 2010 it would shut down its Adult Services section after being accused of facilitating child exploitation and prostitution, according to Wired. Craigslist also told lawmakers it was reporting abuses to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and taking other actions to weed out illegal, exploitative ads.
Meanwhile, according to federal prosecutors, operators of Backpage.com used marketing strategies to knowingly promote such content, working with a web forum that allowed so-called "johns" to post reviews for specific women. They also used an automated filter as well as human moderators to remove terms which would have indicated the ads were for sex work — thereby allowing these ads to still be posted when they would have otherwise been weeded out.
After Backpage.com came to the attention of federal authorities, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said the website was linked to nearly three quarters of all the reports it received of online child sex trafficking.
As part of a CBS News investigation in 2017, one teenager said she was 14 when she was sex trafficked by a man who told her to post on Backpage. He was eventually sentenced to eight years in prison for human trafficking.
She later sued the site, which her mother said had allowed children to be exploited and did nothing to stop it.
"Backpage has a primary purpose and it's to sell sex. Backpage has not done anything to ensure the safety of the kids on there, period," the teen's mother said.
The website's home page currently states its shutdown is part of enforcement by the FBI and federal and state authorities across California, Arizona and Texas.