CEO of 'World's Top Online Brothel' Arrested for Pimping

The CEO of the online platform advertising sex work, Backpage.com, was arrested on Thursday on criminal charges including pimping, as authorities investigate the company for facilitating the sex trafficking of minors.

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Carl Ferrer was arrested for felony charges of pimping a minor, pimping and conspiracy to commit pimping and faces a US$500,000 bond and up to 22 years in prison.

California’s Attorney General Kamala Harris announced a criminal charge on Thursday against the controlling shareholders of Backpage.com, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, for conspiracy to commit pimping. They founded Backpage.com in 2004 and were paid US$10 million bonuses in September 2014, when it was bought out by a Netherlands-based company.

Backpage, the second-largest U.S. online classified ad service after Craigslist, has faced scrutiny from the U.S. Senate, civil lawsuits over sex trafficking and a three-year investigation from the California attorney general’s office.

Backpage argued its rules are meant to prevent unlawful posts and asserted they are not responsible for the ads because they were third-party content. The website makes 99 percent of its revenue off of its classified “adult” section, which includes escorts and strippers, according to the press release. The ads allegedly featured up to 3,000 victims of adult and child sex trafficking in California.

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“Making money off the backs of innocent human beings by allowing them to be exploited for modern-day slavery is not acceptable in Texas,” the state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement Thursday.

The website operates in hundreds of cities around the world, raking in US$3.1 million a week, according to the affidavit.

"Raking in millions of dollars from the trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable victims is outrageous, despicable and illegal," said Harris. "Backpage and its executives purposefully and unlawfully designed Backpage to be the world's top online brothel.”