Punishing the prostitute promotes the rape of all women. When prostitution is a crime, the message conveyed is that women who are sexual are “bad,” and therefore legitimate victims of sexual assault. Sex becomes a weapon to be used by men. – Margo St. James
This item came to my attention from the blog of Beverly Fisher, to which I was alerted by a “tweet” on SWOP. Beverly reported that on Thursday, she and many other escorts in Denver, Colorado received an email purporting to be a promotion for a new escort advertising site, but actually cloaking a sleazy and vicious attempt at extortion. Before I present it, a few words of introduction are in order for my readers who are neither escorts nor “hobbyists” themselves, and therefore may not understand the full implications of this letter.
In most businesses, word about which are reliable and which are not gets around quickly; people talk, and there are Better Business Bureaus and Chambers of Commerce and the like. Professions usually have some sort of ethics board to which violations can be reported, and criminally dishonest practices can even be reported to the police. But since good, ethical escorts are persecuted by the police just as viciously as bad, dishonest ones, customers have little way of knowing one from the other. Once the internet became popular, however, a number of websites sprang up on which “providers” can advertise and “hobbyists” can communicate with each other and post reviews of the different girls’ services. A good, skilled, honest escort who gives clients their money’s worth tends to get good reviews and therefore more business, and a bad, dishonest escort tends to get poor reviews and may eventually be forced to relocate, work for a low-end service or even leave the business altogether. Keep that in mind when reading this email; with Beverly’s kind permission I have left her interpolated comments (italicized in brackets) intact because I think they may help outsiders to our business to understand this letter in the way a working escort would see it.
From: “Denver Escort List” <advertising@denverescortlist.com>
To: [my email]
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 1:21:45 PM
Subject: Escort Advertising service you can not afford to pass up
[Is that like “an offer you can’t refuse”?]Hello,
[This first part is about how great the site is, and how many hits they’re going to get from Google all the time — making them very popular] I am writing to you to inform you of a great advertising opportunity for your escort service in Denver, CO. My team and I have been in the business of advertising for escorts for about 3 years now and we have decided to expand our business to Denver. [really? and who are you?]
Some facts that you might not know
1. Denver Escort gets searched approximately 1,200 times per month.
2. Denver Escorts gets searched about 4 times as much. That is over 5,000 monthly searches that you could be capitalizing on.What we do is build a website, which in this case is http://www.DenverEscortList.com. Then the next step is to start recruiting escorts to advertise on our site. While we are looking for escorts, we also start the promotion of the site. Now I am not going to go into a big lecture about how we get our sites to rank at the top of Google, but that is what we do.
Within 2 months, we will hold the number 1 spot for the local results and the number 1 spot for the organic results. What that means is we will dominate the first page of Google. Out of those 5,000 or more monthly searches we will be getting roughly 80% of that traffic to our site, which is around 4,000 monthly visitors looking for an escort.
We also are members of all the most popular forums and posting boards. We post our site on them daily. Along with backpage, and other classified ads sites, this brings in the maximum amount of traffic daily.
So, I am going to stop right there. Either I or one of my employees found your ad somewhere online and found you to be interesting so we are offering this one time opportunity to advertise with us. You will not receive this offer again.
Our Prices
Regular Escort Listing – $100.00 Per Month – Only 10 spots
– We will give you 7 – 12 good reviews.
– You may upload up to 5 pictures.
– We will design your own personal page with whatever you want it to say.
– You will receive a personal email with our domain. Example – yourname@denverescortlist.com.VIP Escort Listing – $150.00 Per Month – Only 5 spots
– We will give you 12 – 15 good reviews.
– You may upload up to 12 pictures.
– We will design your own personal page with whatever you want it to say.
– You will receive a personal email with our domain. Example – yourname@denverescortlist.com
– We will provide you with a local number that forwards to your number, so you can track how many clients you are getting from our site.
– You will have a spot on our featured slide bar, at the top of the home page.
– You will also get 6 days as our Escort of the month on the first page, per month.If you choose to not advertise with us, you will be listed in the Escorts that we do not recommend section of our website. Oddly enough this portion of our sites gets quite a bit of traffic also.
[This portion of the site is called “Denver Escorts to Avoid.” Check out the site to see. In this business, reputation is everything, and these bastards know it.]
Again this is a time sensitive one time offer. You have 3 days to reply to this email, or the offer goes out the window and will never return. We will never ask you to advertise with us again.
[You have 3 days to give us our hush money, or we trash your name, and you’re f*cked for good.]
To claim your position on our website today, just email us back and let us know you are interested. After payment is received we will have your listing up within 24 hours. You have total control over your listing and always have to approve it before it goes live.
We look forward to working with you.
Sincerely,
Josh Haso
http://www.DenverEscortList.comP.S. We are offering the first 5 escorts a yearly special. Pay in advance for one year and get 2 months free.
Regular Escort Listing – $75.00 x 10 = $750.00 for the year.
VIP Escort Listing – $150.00 x 10 = $1,500.00 for the year.
This is only for the first 5 escorts that choose this service.
Besides the fact that they blatantly offer to write FAKE REVIEWS, which would allow a bad girl (or even a vice department willing to spend the money) to pretend to be an established escort with a great reputation, what’s to stop them from writing equally fake bad reviews of those who won’t give these bloodsuckers their cut? And what if they start planting those fake reviews on other sites as well (“We also are members of all the most popular forums and posting boards”)? If this is not crushed immediately, the entire industry in Denver (and everywhere else these parasites are allowed to infest) will be thrown into chaos and both clients and escorts exposed to danger from predatory cops.
Fortunately, Beverly had the good sense and courage to stand up to these Mafioso pimps and instead of kowtowing she posted this letter on every escort board she knows and asked her friends to do the same; the site changed as soon as they realized they had been exposed, removing the “Escorts to Avoid” tab and posting an editorial entitled “The Harassment Has Began” [sic]:
We have already received quite a few emails about the advertising offered yesterday. We have been threatened and people are trying to scare us with their internet words. We are also being accused of extortion.
We are extorting escorts for offering them a service? I don’t think so. All we are doing is offering advertising for escorts in the Denver, CO area. Escorts that need an easier way for clients to find them. Which in most people’s eyes is a good thing.
Of course we are charging for this service. We have to WORK to get the site ranked number one. We have to WORK to get clients to the site. So, Yes we want paid for this work.
We think we have pretty reasonable prices also. If you don’t like the prices go somewhere, but nowhere else are you going to receive the traffic or personal touch you would receive with us. That is your decision though not ours. We have been helping escorts for over three years now, and also saving a lot of clients from meeting up with a bad escort or escort with poor reviews.
We are currently booking positions right now for the VIP and Regular escort listings, and these escorts will see how great this service is. For the ones that think we are extorting them, keep posting your ad on forums that cost more and are less effective, keep posting your ad on backpage.com which costs $5.00 right now, and is going to be shut down just like craigslist. What are you going to do then?
We wish you all the best. If you decide to advertise with us, we look forward to working with you. If you choose not to, then we sincerely wish you the best of luck.
The team at Denver Escort List
Gangsters try to muscle in on the organized working girls of “Sin City”
In other words, “boo hoo hoo, those bad ladies were mean to us!” They were caught at attempted extortion, and now they’re trying to cover their butts. They ”offer a service” all right, just like protection rackets offer businessmen the “service” of not burning their store down. And just as old-time gangsters thrived in areas where the police were weak and corrupt, so these modern gangsters hope to profit from women who cannot ask for help due to our legally oppressed status. But like so many ignorant men they made the mistake of believing the asinine male stereotype that working girls are lowlifes who will stab each other in the back for a dollar, which is no more true today than it was in Phryne’s time. Though every group has its “bad apples”, most escorts have a strong sense of sisterhood and will stick together against the slime infesting government and society who would try to exploit us.
