Research,Research comparing AdultWork, Friday-ad, vivastreet, Backpage etc

[randyrobert]

I like probably most of you out there rely on AW to see who is out there, but there are other sites such as Friday-ad, viva street, backpage/cracker etc. so I thought I would do a little experiment.-its not totally scientific-but maybe informative.

I counted  ads for  in-call escorts in my locality on AW (69), Friday-Ad (3), Backpage/Cracker (3) and vivastreet (23). I looked at phone numbers (and used these to search Google for other profiles using them) and also images (and used these in Google reverse images to pull up other profiles where they appeared).

None of the Friday-Ads corresponded to an AW profile, two had images of impossibly gorgeous girls (usually a sign of bait and switch) one ad corresponded to a Vivastreet profile. Searching by phone numbers showed that the number had been attached to another profile in the past with different images.

Of the backpage/cracker ads (the sites mirror each other) one corresponded to an AW profile (images of the same woman) but used a different phone number. So this ad was genuine. The two other ads were consistent, phone number and image searches only brought up the same ads.

Of the 23 Vivastreet profiles  three used phone numbers corresponding to AW profiles. Of these three one profile used the same number and same photos on a number of different advertising platfroms and in addition had a ukpunting review-so definitely genuine. Of the two others the phone numbers had at different times been attached to different profiles on other sites. A review on ukpunting suggests there is a group operating bait and switch.

Of the other twenty ads nine of the profiles were posted by the same person (although the profiles ostensibly corresponded to different individuals). Some of these “individuals” co-incidentally had the same phone numbers (8 of the nine were duplicated or triplicated) . Phone number searches turned up other profiles with different names that had used the same phone number.I think these are probably bait-and –switch merchants.

Image searches were useful-one turned up someone using the same photos attached to a different profile (with a different phone number) 140 miles away.

There were a few Vivstreet ads where phone number and image searches turned up the same profile-but these were the minority.

Now I know prozzies often advertise on several sites, AW being the basic one and other sites are useful in different locations. The more  savvy may use different phone numbers on different sites so they can market research which sites bring in most business so different phone numbers is not necessarily a red flag. (Their experience seems to be that Vivastreet attracts more timewasters and no-shows than AW)

I think the lesson (as always)  is-do your research-especially on non AW site;.Google the phone number and use reverse image search-but even that is no guarantee. Best of all is to use ukpunting-at least that way you can assure yourself that the prozzie actually exists and is like she is advertised.

[Fredbone]

Doing you MA ?

[Hectorshouse]

RR - you are tackling the problem with a logical mind, however your libido is probably saying - get out there and take a chance!

The research is good, but doesn't give you the experience - you are bound to have good, great and bad punts!

All part of reading the signs, but meeting the WG's will help you fathom out what the heck is going on!

[WASA38]

Interesting, rr. but I would appreciate your comment on one anomaly I have encountered. If I do a Google search on the phone number published on the AW profile I often get something relevant come up on Escort Adviser but most other webpages including VS show a load of escorts in a certain location but none, as far as I can ascertain, with that particular phone number.

Have you found the same ? Am I missing something ?

[scutty brown]

Interesting, rr. but I would appreciate your comment on one anomaly I have encountered. If I do a Google search on the phone number published on the AW profile I often get something relevant come up on Escort Adviser but most other webpages including VS show a load of escorts in a certain location but none, as far as I can ascertain, with that particular phone number.

Have you found the same ? Am I missing something ?

Its where Google has an index for a deleted advert: if you click on a link to a deleted VS advert, VS instead substitutes a list of other advertisers in the same area.

[scutty brown]

RandyRobert

I do this on a regular basis. But the interesting stats come when (for a specific area) you get the girls actual addresses and then tabulate those into a spreadsheet. The duplicate accounts / phone numbers soon become apparent. As does the linkage between girls, showing which gang/group they belong to.
After a while you'll start to see patterns emerging as - for instance - following raids, the pimps shift from one town to another. For instance, here in Lancs there has been a move by EE girls away from Blackburn and Burnley following several well-publicised busts. Twelve months ago Blackburn was the local hotbed of trafficking, now its Preston with at least 13 EE pop-up brothels at present There's only about 16 in the whole of the rest of the county.
But if you want to find the number of foreign working girls in an area, a rough rule of thumb is to gather all the phone numbers from AW, VS and UKAdultzone and weed out the repeated numbers. Take that list of individual discrete numbers, multiply by 0.7 and you'll get a (very) rough head count.

And an afterthought: experience suggests the Backpage / Friday-Ad kind of adverts are by pimps who are trying to offer their girls - for whatever reason -below the authorities radar. The transient nature of the ads makes it harder to track the people involved.

[randyrobert]

WASA38: Unfortunately there are a number of scam sites out there which nick profiles (including phone numbers) from WGs to populate their own sites-so a Google search on phone numbers sometimes turn these up. For a discussion see (External Link/Members Only)

Scutty: Very interesting comment. I too noticed the linkage between accounts and phone numbers and how these groups move around and might be an indication of control by another. Indeed it is the topic of this article Skidmore et al 2017 The threat of exploitation in the adult sex market: A pilot study of online sex worker advertisements Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice (summary here External Link/Members Only)

I like your rule of thumb-I am intrigued that ad counting might be a way of estimating the overall size of the prostitute population, a method rejected in the recent report Mapping the on-line sex industry (External Link/Members Only) pgs 2-5 on the grounds that prostitutes advertise on a number of platforms so totalling the different number of phone numbers might be an overestimate.

I think that while it is true that indie prostitutes advertise on several sites almost all will have an AW presence (since the site is the largest and is free) so the AW total will be close to the total number of indie prostitutes, then add in the agency prozzies,  sauna girls and the street prozzies and you will be close to the overall figure of prostitutes.

[scutty brown]

Robert
I've been analysing the local figures for a couple of years now, and it seems to give a reasonable estimate. You're right about the overcounting due to girls using multiple phones - that's where the 0.7 multiplier comes from. You could maybe argue that 0.6 would be safer. Either  way its simply a very rough approximation.

As to your theory that most indies use AW, then you're way off track. First problem is define "indy", in reality few foreign girls in this country are truly independent, most are controlled or "assisted" to get here to a lesser or greater extent. When you start brushing the service its amazing what underlayers of crime start appearing.
However the bigger issue is that most Eastern European girls now DON'T use AW. Most of them travel on ID cards, not passports and AW stopped accepting ID cards as valid ID around 16 months ago. That's resulted in a large drop in EE girls on AW with a corresponding increase in Vivastreet profiles. At present for Lancashire the ratio is around 4 or 5 to 1. In fact for most of January the EE numbers on AW for Lancs were actually lower than the number of Thai profiles listed.
You tend to get tiers in how the girls advertise.
Those on AW are more likely to be genuinely independent and in charge of their own destiny - thats why they have passports.
Those on Vivastreet are more likely to be controlled to a greater or lesser extent, some voluntarily, some not. There is a degree of crossover between the two, but not as much as you'd expect. Pimps don't like paying to list the phone numbers on AW...
Those on Backpage / Friday Ad and similar are most likely to be here illegally and forced. Again there is a small degree of crossover, but much less than you'd expect.

[randyrobert]

Interesting what you say-however “….Pimps don't like paying to list the phone numbers on AW...”-but they are willing to pay much more for Vivastreet ads????

[scutty brown]

Interesting what you say-however “….Pimps don't like paying to list the phone numbers on AW...”-but they are willing to pay much more for Vivastreet ads????

Its been a couple of years since I last checked, but when I last helped a girl set up a Vivastreet profile it was free. You had to pay to set up auto-renew for the profile every week, or to make it a "priority" profile at the top of the list. If you didn't do one or the other the advert dropped down the list with time and eventually expired. The cheap answer was simply to create a new profile every few days - hence one reason why some girls have so many duplicate profiles. Vivastreet don't mind duplicates.

Going back to my earlier comments re numbers: I need to elaborate that this doesn't account for the "hidden" girls who are not openly advertised. E.G. The presumed several thousand chinese girls only offered in Chinese language newspapers, the Russian girls in cities such as Liverpool who are offered by word of mouth / touted in clubs / pimped by taxi drivers. Impossible to put a handle on those without more information, but my sources tell me that (for instance) there are probably more Russians working in Liverpool than there are Romanians: they're simply not visible.

[scutty brown]

Scutty: Very interesting comment. I too noticed the linkage between accounts and phone numbers and how these groups move around and might be an indication of control by another. Indeed it is the topic of this article Skidmore et al 2017 The threat of exploitation in the adult sex market: A pilot study of online sex worker advertisements Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice (summary here External Link/Members Only)

I like your rule of thumb-I am intrigued that ad counting might be a way of estimating the overall size of the prostitute population, a method rejected in the recent report Mapping the on-line sex industry (External Link/Members Only) pgs 2-5 on the grounds that prostitutes advertise on a number of platforms so totalling the different number of phone numbers might be an overestimate.

The key thing there is not to concentrate on counting the profiles: the key figure is the number of individual discrete phone numbers, and using that to estimate the real number of girls. Profile counting alone tells you very little.

[randyrobert]

Scutty
Having looked at Viva street ads in my locality I would agree that there are 70% unique phone numbers so your 0.7 multiplier is probably about right. However some of those are bait-and switch and some use images filched from other places-so be warned and using the phone number search in google brings up Vivastreet ads for different locations in the past –not surprising as most tour.

In my limited experience of viva street-and despite doing my research-all three were bait-and-switch and poor punts but YMMV. I think Vivastreet survives as (surprisingly) many would be punters do not know about AW and just enter in Google “escort in town xyx” and vivastreet comes up at the top site. Equally as you mention those prozzies who would not pass AW verification or don’t want to let out identifying passport/identity card will go to Viva street.

I quite agree that profile counting is no good-counting unique phone numbers is better-but then some prozzies do market research by using different numbers for the different sites they advertise from-so total unique phone numbers may be an over-count. As to the size of the hidden population-who knows?

In a different vein a while back I tried to get an estimate of the number of unique girls working for escort agencies in London. I collected data for all the agencies of girls offering in calls I could find. Thenlooking at images of the girls you soon notice that the same woman uses multiple agencies. I then used a “capture-recapture” technique to find out how many unique girls there were-about 512. Other cross checks verified this was close to the true figure.

Anyway enough of that off to see a real SP this pm.

[randyrobert]

I thought I was beginning to get somewhere analysing the ads posted on Vivastreet in my locality, I decided to look at the ads to see how many overlapped those on AW. After looking at 100 ads I found only 13 had acorresponding AW ads -so Vivastreet might represent a good source of alternative talent. However these 100 ads had only 67 unique phone numbers, so the same phone number was reused by ostensibly different people. (again supporting Scutty’s “rule of thumb” see #5 above)

Thinking pimps might be reusing the same numbers I looked at who posted ads in my locale “Tabitadreagnea” seems to post the most ads using the same phone number sets. Another prolific poster of ads with the same number is “Anays”-ah-ha I thought –another pimp-until I noticed that “Anays” sometimes had ads with the same phone number as used by “Tabitadreagnea” and looking further there is also a poster called “evelin23” who had used the same phone number on occasion as “Anays”. So I am beginning to think that “Tabitadreagnea” “Anays” and “evelin23” might be one and the same.

Sometimes clicking on the posters name will bring up other ads posted-many are in the same locale-but others may be in a completely different town. So does this expose some sort of organisation-or does Vivastreet just have a limited number of posters names they reuse?

Or am I overthinking?

[scutty brown]

You've come across a Romanian trafficking group.
You'll find multiple permutations of profiles sharing phone numbers. Sometimes its one girl with multiple profiles, other times one phone number is shared by multiple girls. And often one girl has multiple numbers.
For instance, at the last count one local girl - Lorena - had five phone numbers, at least twelve profiles, six different Admin accounts on Vivastreet: on her own she made up ~9% of the total VS profiles for Lancashire. At one time last year she and her mate Myky together accounted for 20%...........
In a similar way, last year one Romanian thug gang specialising in only outcalls got jailed......the number of profiles dropped by 25% though there were only around six girls.
At one stage last year, a local group of four Poles had 17 profiles and seven or eight phone numbers........

The names you quote sound familiar - if they're who I think they are, its a Romanian touring gang with four girls and around eight profiles.....one of them is as anorexic as hell.
Can you post links to the profiles ? It will be interesting to see.

[randyrobert]

Well at the risk of clogging up the thread-here are some I found:

Tabitadreagnea used phone number 07404451534 on the following

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And used 07404534975 on
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And used 07459065259 on
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Is that enough to be getting on with?

[scutty brown]

the first three I looked at are already deleted........but that leads to another point
You'll see that clicking on the brings up a listing of 17 current profiles, which you can link into two batches based on price: one lot £100/140 per hour incall/outcall, the other £100/150. You can often use such trends to link profiles

[randyrobert]

I have only just noticed that if you go to the profile and right click on the photos there is (sometimes) a pull down menu which says "Search Google for image"-doing that can sometimes bring up other ads or profiles where that image has been used. Then you can sometimes find name and profile blurb variants.

It saves pasting the image url in Google images

[randyrobert]

I somehow don’t think this one is real (External Link/Members Only). The photos are of Russian model Anya Sugar- I would be surprised if she was available at £100 ph. in my neck of the woods.

[raj676]

absolutely great thread - she is in my hotlist External Link/Members Only - but now I am worried

I thought I was beginning to get somewhere analysing the ads posted on Vivastreet in my locality, I decided to look at the ads to see how many overlapped those on AW. After looking at 100 ads I found only 13 had acorresponding AW ads -so Vivastreet might represent a good source of alternative talent. However these 100 ads had only 67 unique phone numbers, so the same phone number was reused by ostensibly different people. (again supporting Scutty’s “rule of thumb” see #5 above)

Thinking pimps might be reusing the same numbers I looked at who posted ads in my locale “Tabitadreagnea” seems to post the most ads using the same phone number sets. Another prolific poster of ads with the same number is “Anays”-ah-ha I thought –another pimp-until I noticed that “Anays” sometimes had ads with the same phone number as used by “Tabitadreagnea” and looking further there is also a poster called “evelin23” who had used the same phone number on occasion as “Anays”. So I am beginning to think that “Tabitadreagnea” “Anays” and “evelin23” might be one and the same.

Sometimes clicking on the posters name will bring up other ads posted-many are in the same locale-but others may be in a completely different town. So does this expose some sort of organisation-or does Vivastreet just have a limited number of posters names they reuse?

Or am I overthinking?