Shanghai police crack down on inter-province online prostitution

Baoshan police reported that they shut down a large-scale inter-province online prostitution ring and arrested the principal offender, surnamed Liu, along with another 21 suspects and 52 prostitute managers on Aug. 6.

Prostitution facilitated between Hubei province and Shanghai

In May of this year, Baoshan police were informed that a man provided information about procuring prostitutes to local Internet bars. According to provided clues, police quickly found Liu and discovered that there was enough evidence to suspect him of crimes.

Liu frequently released the information through online chat rooms with graphic language and pictures to attract customers. In order to avoid capture by police, he changed his IP address constantly.

After customers expressed their interest, Liu would talk about prices through QQ, a famous online chat program, and then he would call customers and tell them the place to meet with the prostitutes.

After a period of investigation, police found that Liu and Chen, another principal offender in Hubei, would usually release information in Hubei Province, while the crimes actually occurred in Shanghai. On Aug. 6, police of Hubei Province and Shanghai started actions at same time and arrested three managers of prostitutes and seven staff who publicized the service.

Prostitutes could earn 20,000 yuan per month

Twelve prostitutes, aged from 18 to 25, have been arrested in total, and most of them had very flirty online nicknames, which were classified into seven categories, such as "Shanghai local girls," "post-90s girls" and so on.

Each prostitute could earn about 300 yuan for one sexual service and 800 to 1000 yuan for a whole night's service, and some prostitutes also provided the rare service of S&M (sadomasochism).

Baoshan police reported that a prostitute could earn 40,000 yuan per month on average and handed in 50 percent of her income to the manager and the publicity staff, and the total case-involving money was about hundreds of thousands yuan.

After trial, police arrested 52 managers according clues, most of those people are white-collar and gold-collar workers from local Shanghai companies and famous foreign-funded enterprises. Some of them were even doctoral students and study-abroad students of well-known universities.

The lead detective, surnamed He, said the crime was committed through the Internet and the perpetrators used a number of tools to cover their tracks. It was even harder for police to discover their crime since they did it in two different places at the same time.

He appealed to the public to report unhealthy information immediately once they find it on the Internet.

By Wang Hanlu, People's Daily Online