Escorts, Incalls, and Massage Parlours

It’s not unusual for a Private Investigator to seek evidence of prostitution or encounter it by chance.

When I was doing surveillance, I followed quite a few prostitutes. I followed them to hotels, homes, massage parlors, and once during the 80′s, to a popular street corner. An associate recently followed one to court.

With street prostitution in Toronto nearly wiped-out by legislation, PI’s normally encounter Escorts, Incalls, and Massage Parlours. Here is my short primer on the subject.

An Escort goes to his or her customer. An Incall is a small brothel in an apartment or house. The Massage Parlor usually operates from commercial premises, whether it is duly licenced or not.

Surveillance that uncovers prostitution usually occurs by chance. The Investigator just happens to follow the subject at the right time. To deliberately uncover involvement in prostitution requires a more organized approach.

First, gather-up what you know about the subject and articulate why you believe that prostitution may be an issue. This is crucial because somebody will be reading your report and it must be made clear that such inquires and searches were undertaken for appropriate reasons.

Second, begin your search in the courts, both civil and criminal. Civil actions involving Landlord & Tenant, Divorce, or Family Law may mention prostitution. Criminal courts may uncover charges involving prostitution and drugs — they often go together. Drug charges may result from a search of a brothel or massage parlor. By-law offences may involve unlicenced massage parlours and related infractions.

Third, search media reports and police press releases that mention the subject, or addresses associated with your subject. An article about a raid on a brothel or massage parlour may mention the street or full address, but not the subject’s name. Prostitutes rarely use their real names.

Fourth, an Internet search for all addresses and telephone numbers associated with the subject may uncover advertisements and other prostitution related information. Then conduct a search of all the local prostitution related forums that review escorts and other types of prostitutes for telephone numbers and addresses associated with the subject.

Finally, write clear and concise conclusions about your findings.

Here are some useful sites for the Toronto area:

Censorship: You be the Judge

Google Ad-sense sent an automated notice that their machines were going to stop serving ads because I listed the sites that we often search for telephone numbers as explained above.  Of course machines can’t read, but they can find links. Now Google is censoring content because they don’t like to place ads on anything that has links to sites that they don’t like, in this case so-called ‘adult content’.  I can understand not wanting to be involved in promoting pornography or the sex trade, but this is only a machine telling me what to write and there is nobody to talk to and no living person at Google ever read this article.