NEW YORK (AP) — Federal authorities in New York City have arrested the head of an online male escort service and six of his employees on prostitution charges.
Prosecutors announced the charges Tuesday against Rentboy.com Chief Executive Office Jeffrey Hurant and the other defendants. Each faces up to five years in prison and a fine up to $250,000.
Disclaimers on New York-based Rentboy.com had said its listings were for companionship and not for sexual services.
But a federal complaint alleges that in reality the site was designed to advertise prostitution.
Mr. Hurant, 50, is awaiting a court appearance in Brooklyn. The name of his attorney wasn’t immediately available.
A complaint was announced by the Department of Justice’s U.S. Attorney’s Office in eastern New York, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations and the New York Police Department.
The announcement said six bank accounts and $1.4 million were seized.
Boxes of documents and computers from the office at West 14th Street, off Fifth Avenue, said ABC News.
Rentboy.com was founded in 1997, and hosted thousands of paid advertisements. Men who paid a fee to post their information on the site would be contacted by interested parties.
The site charged a minimum monthly fee of $59.95 and up to several hundred dollars to advertise, said announcement from Kelly T. Currie, acting U.S. attorney for the eastern district of New York.
Between 2010 and 2015, Rentboy.com grossed more than $10 million, Mr. Currie said.
The complaint also said the seven were charged with “conspiring to violate the Travel Act by promoting prostitution,” according to CNN.
The Transgender Law Center decried the arrests Wednesday, saying Rentboy.com has been operating “in public view” for 18 years.
“This bust comes at a time when human rights advocates globally are uniting around a call to decriminalize sex work, and at a time when the United States has the largest prison population in the world, with people of color, particularly Black people, representing a vastly disproportionate percentage of the incarcerated,” the Transgender Law Center said.
It noted that it recently joined other lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) advocacy groups in support of Amnesty International’s call to decriminalize sex work.
The Rentboy.com arrests are “a clear demonstration of why LGBT organizations and people must be invested in this work to protect the human rights of sex workers,” the center said. Laws criminalizing sexual exchange “impede sex workers’ ability to negotiate condom use and other boundaries,” and force many to work in hidden or remote places where they are more vulnerable to violence, the center said.
Washington Times staffmember Cheryl Wetzstein contributed to this article.
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