How crime gangs are using legal adult websites to sell their victims in cities including Leeds

But a top officer from the National Crime Agency (NCA) say the websites can also help to keep women choosing sex work to stay off the streets and safe.

Rob Richardson, head of the NCA’s Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Unit, said the adult services websites (ASWs) are widely used by criminals who fly their victims into the country and force them to sell their bodies for sex.

He said: “We recognise that ASWs are a significant enabler, and if we are looking at the internet as an enabler of exploitation then ASWs provide the lion’s share of that.

“But one of the things that’s really interesting about ASWs is that there are positive aspects and negative aspects.

“The positive aspects are around providing a safe environment for sex workers to advertise their services, so it can be argued that using ASWs takes sex workers off the streets and potentially puts them in control of the services they offer.

“They are able to vet clients and they are able to be clear in the services they offer, so the ASWs do offer some kind of safety benefit.”

Prostitution is not illegal in the UK but some related activities are outlawed, such as soliciting in a public place, pimping, and curb crawling.

While websites like Vivastreet, which only charges those placing adverts, operate legally and largely cooperate with police and the NCA, it is illegal to force people into prostitution - or to pay for sex with a trafficking victim.

Jess Harrison, an operations manager on the NCA unit, said: “It’s pretty common [for gangs to use the sites] because that’s how the majority of legal sex workers will advertise, and also because it’s advertising to the mass market.

“If we disrupt an organised crime group that was sexually exploiting victims and they haven’t used ASWs that would be very surprising to us.”

But working out which adverts are for legitimate sex workers and which are for trafficking victims is not easy.

“A lot of the time these criminals are actually very clever and they very much make the adverts very similar - if not identical - to those of legitimate users of the ASWs,” Ms Harrison said.

“A law enforcement agency or police force wouldn’t just look at an ASW and say, ‘Right, we think that’s a trafficker’, they would layer it with other sources of intelligence.”

Lancashire Police, one of the most successful forces at combating modern slavery, has smashed a number of trafficking rings in recent years.

Details of one operation were revealed during a Parliamentary inquiry into prostitution, which was told officers discovered one man being investigated had spent so much cash placing adverts on Vivastreet - £25,000 - the website even gave him his own account manager.

After visiting a suspected brothel, detectives realised the crooks were loading prepaid credit cards with cash in Preston, Lancashire, before using them to buy adverts on Vivastreet.

And late last year, the force said young Romanian women were being moved from northern town to town by a gang, which advertised them for sale on Vivastreet as “new to town”, with one sold as ‘Bella from Blackpool’ one week and ‘Kathy in Whitehaven’ the next.

The illicit ring was smashed - with five eastern European men and one woman jailed in November after brothels were uncovered in Leeds, Bradford, Nottingham and London - after neighbours tipped off authorities about a home in Blackburn hosting a “conveyor belt of men”.

The Parliamentary inquiry’s subsequent report said websites such as Vivastreet were “key” to the business model of organised crime groups who dominate the UK’s off-street sex trade.

“They provide a quick and easy way for traffickers to connect with men around the country who are willing to pay to gain sexual access to a woman’s body,” it concluded.

“Any notion that prostitution websites introduce ‘safety’ to the sex trade by making procurement visible is a dangerous and misleading fallacy.

“They hide sexual exploitation in plain sight. The websites significantly contribute to the ease and scale of sex trafficking.”

The report recommended that owners and operators of prostitution procurement websites be held legally accountable for “the sexual exploitation they enable and profit from” and for “negligently failing to prevent” their platforms being used for this purpose.

A debate was held to discuss the issue, leading to a demonstration from the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement (Swarm), the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) and the xTalk collective, and the law remained the same.

“If we can’t advertise online and work independently, many of us would be forced to work in other ways, including on the streets where it is much more dangerous to work, or we will be pushed into the hands of exploitative brothel bosses,” the ECP said in a blog post.

A new Bill aimed at stopping such websites had its first reading in the House of Commons in December, with a date for a second reading to be announced.

It was introduced by Labour’s Dame Diana Johnson, who said: “It is a national scandal that our laws currently allow pimping websites to operate openly and freely.”

She continued: “Sex trafficking cannot be ‘designed out’ of pimping websites. There is no way the website company – or sex buyer – can know if a woman advertised on the site is being coerced by a trafficker or pimp.”

Ms Harrison from the NCA said the agency has engaged with Vivastreet and another "market leader" at “relatively regular intervals over the past few years”.

She said: “On the whole, when law enforcement and policing request information… they respond very effectively and provide all of the information that was requested of them.”

Vivastreet, which operates in more than a dozen countries, said its top priority is “providing a safe platform for legal user-generated content”.

“We have a wide range of measures in place to enhance user safety, and detect and remove inappropriate content,” a spokesman said.

“We proactively report any suspicious activity to police, either directly or via our long-term partnership with Ugly Mugs, a specialist charity that works with police forces across the country.

“We also partner with Unseen, a charity that operates the UK-wide Modern Slavery Helpline, through which we encourage users to report any concerns about trafficking or exploitation.”

The firm added: “As all those working to combat online exploitation will acknowledge, the challenge from those who seek to misuse our platform is complex and ever-changing.

“We therefore constantly review and update our safety measures.”

The Modern Slavery Helpline can be called on 08000 121 700.

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