Eric Omuro was charged but not convicted on 24 counts of money laundering. He eventually pleaded guilty to a single federal charge of "using a facility of interstate commerce with the intent to facilitate prostitution".
This looks to be a charge under the federal Mann act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act), which criminalizes using a facility of interstate commerce (i.e. the internet) to promote any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense. That offense would be the CA law against prostitution 647(b) (http://law.onecle.com/california/penal/647.html)
The Mann act has an ugly history of being used to convict all sorts of consensual sexual activity. For example, black men with white girlfriends (against state laws criminalizing interracial sex), and even sex outside of marriage (against state laws criminalizing adultery and premarital sex).
In San Francisco, ESPLER (Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research, http://esplerp.org/, https://twitter.com/esplerp) filed suit yesterday against several Bay Area DAs and the California Attorney General, in an attempt to get the primary CA law against prostitution overturned on constutitional grounds. This is on a similar basis
There are retweets of sex work abolitionist groups, @SharedHope and @RestoreCorps. There are also tweets like this one: https://twitter.com/RescueForensics/status/25676583846244352...
"We are building forensics to fight human trafficking online - abolitionists must bring the fight to the internet!"
It looks like Rescue Forensics has aligned itself with sex work abolitionist groups that pose as anti-trafficking groups. And who have huge incentives to inflate the problem by many orders of maginitude, to create government funding for their groups and for this kind of work.
An aisde: as of today, @RescueForensics has 6,231 followers but only 74 tweets. The first 6,000 or so of these followers look like they were bought. Some might say that gives some indication of the ethics of this company.
If you look at most human trafficking law enforcement efforts, the vast majority is arrests of adult men and women who are consensually buying and selling sex. This is incorrectly labeled "sex trafficking" by law enforcement and the media. But the federal definition of sex trafficking is coercion, or of someone under 18.
It is unconscionable for law enforcement and abolitionists to use stings to go after the large, easy targets of consenting adults to pump up the numbers and money, while the horror of real human trafficking takes real investigative effort, time, and money, but doesn't have large numbers to as easily justify this effort.
The real solution is to decriminalize consensual adult sex work (like in New Zealand and parts of Australia), allowing everyone to focus on the true horrors of human trafficking. But that goes against the goals of the religious-based abolitionist groups, which have hijacked the human trafficking discussion and funding to push their anti-sex agenda.
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/24/when_porn_stars_become_escor... http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/... https://twitter.com/EscortingAdvice/status/55980097959219200...