An Arizona judge has sentenced three owners of the website Backpage.com, which authorities shut down in 2018, to five to 10 years in prison for laundering money from the “leading online prostitution advertising forum,” the US Justice Department announced.
Co-founder Michael Lacey, who was convicted of money laundering charges in November, was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay a “heavy fine,” prosecutors said in a statement Wednesday.
Two other owners, Scott Spear, 73, and John “Jed” Brunst, 72, received 10-year sentences on similar charges.
“The defendants and their co-conspirators obtained more than $500 million by operating an online forum that facilitated the sexual exploitation of countless victims,” said Nicole Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
Backpage — accused of being the world’s leading prostitution site, with its millions of classified ads used to offer paid sex sometimes involving minors and victims of trafficking — was shut down by US authorities in April 2018.
“The evidence presented at trial showed that the conspirators knowingly promoted prostitution through various marketing strategies,” the Justice Department said.
In particular, they had linked their site to an independent Internet forum on which opinions on relationships with prostitutes were published.
According to the same source, the three men then “laundered the money through numerous shell companies that they had created in several foreign countries.”
