Craiglist Sued for Being World’s Biggest Pimp   - 1,354 Views, 1 Comment

Craiglist has been slapped with a lawsuit by the Cook County Sheriff’s Department (Chicago) for being, in essence, the world’s biggest pimp. The lawsuit contends that Craigslist is “the single largest source of prostitution in the nation.”

According to Sheriff Thomas Dart, in just one month (June of 2008) during a Craigslist prostitution sting, they arrested 76 men and women. In another arrest, they broke up a Craiglist prostitution ring that was pimping out teenaged girls as young as 15.

All told, in the past two years, the Cook County Sheriff’s Department has arrested an average of 10 people a month for prostitution via Craiglist.

And this is just in one county, in one state.

According to the lawsuit, “The sheriff conducts stings through Craigslist regularly. However, the deluge of erotic services postings taxes its resources. The sheer number of daily postings has made it impossible to stymie Craigslist generated prostitution.”

Said a statement by Craigslist on the matter “Misuse of craigslist to facilitate criminal activity is completely unacceptable, and we continue to work diligently to prevent it. Misuse of the site is exceptionally rare compared to how much the site is used for legal purposes. Regardless, any misuse of the site is not tolerated on Craigslist.”

Which sounds great, although it’s a bit hard to swallow when you look at the sample postings included in the complaint:

If Craigslist really doesn’t want these sorts of services being advertised on their site, then why did they create an “Erotic Services” section in the first place?

Claims the lawsuit, “Erotic services enables defendant to charge fees of up to $75 per post for job openings due to the significant web traffic garnered by erotic services.”

Oh well, if the Cook County Sheriff is successful in shutting down Craigslist’s Erotic Services, perhaps California-based Craigslist can turn their Internet technology to finding online maps which haven’t blurred their targets - we hear that there’s good money in that.