'Ordering a woman to be sexually exploited is as easy as ordering a takeaway': How trafficking victims are being sold online

Sky News

4 hours ago

*Sarah thought she was going to a job interview to become a waitress.
Warning: This story includes graphic descriptions of sexual exploitation and abuse, including rape
Instead, she was lured to a strange man's flat and held against her will for six months.
"One of the very first things he did was ask for me to hand over my passport to check that I had the right to work," she says. "I remember him asking me kind of odd questions, like, 'do you like sex?'
"I remember him taking me into another room within this flat and closing the door behind him, then locking the door. And then I was raped."
She says her passport was used to create an online profile to advertise her for sex.
She had no control over the adverts, no access to the accounts, and was repeatedly abused by her trafficker and the men who booked her through the website.
"My abuser would say: 'This man would like to see you, he's booked you, but he's requested sloppy seconds. Okay? I am going to rape you again so that when you go and see this man, you will take that to that man'," she tells Sky News.
Sarah says she was forced to take on different names to match her trafficker's rotating online personas.
She ultimately escaped after threatening to scream unless her abuser let her go.
"He just glared at me, furious," she recalls. "But he opened the door. That was the moment I had. That was the moment I took. I ran out and never saw him again."
Sarah's abuser is now in prison. But the website that he used to facilitate her abuse is still operating.
A Sky News investigation has uncovered thousands of potential indicators of sexual exploitation on two of the UK's most prominent adult service websites, raising serious concerns about how traffickers may be using these platforms to advertise and abuse victims like Sarah.
Analysis of more than 50,000 adverts on AdultWork and Vivastreet - two of the country's largest escorting platforms - revealed a high concentration of red flags linked to organised exploitation, including repeated use of the same contact numbers, and/or duplicated advert text, across adverts for different women in different geographical locations.
These patterns, highlighted by the Sex Trafficking Indication Matrix (STIM), a research tool used to identify signs of trafficking, suggest some profiles may be linked to coercive networks.
In one case, the same phone number appeared in eight separate adverts for at least five different women, all listed with identical ages, nearly identical descriptions, but different photographs and spread across multiple UK regions.
Neither platform is accused of criminal activity, but experts and campaigners say the scale and nature of these indicators are red flags for potential abuse.
Prostitution is legal in England and Wales. But the controlling of prostitution for gain, sometimes called pimping, and the more severe crime of trafficking, are not.
"These platforms make it as easy to order a woman to be sexually exploited as it is to order a takeaway," said Kat Banyard, director of campaign group UK Feminista.
"There are big questions for national policing to answer about why it is that this important investigation has had to be done by Sky News, and why it wasn't national policing that was launching an investigation to uncover the scale of potential criminality on these sites."
Over several months, Sky News used STIM indicators to assess escorting adverts across two platforms. On Vivastreet alone, more than 7,000 were linked to phone numbers that appeared multiple times - more than half the total number of listings at the time.
On AdultWork, over 1,000 ads were found to contain duplicated descriptions.
In one example on AdultWork, the same wording was used in 357 different listings - a sign that content may have been copied and pasted to cover for multiple individuals under a single operator.
The websites told us duplication can reflect legitimate activity, such as touring sex workers using aliases. However, opponents say their structure allows abusers to hide in plain sight.
Sky News can also reveal that officials at the Home Office met representatives from escorting websites 25 times between 2017 and 2024, under the previous Conservative government.
Critics argue these discussions have failed to lead to meaningful safeguards or regulation.
A Home Affairs Committee report in 2023 was highly critical of this kind of engagement.
And in parliament, pressure is building to take stronger action. Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi has tabled an amendment to the Policing and Crime Bill that would seek to ban such websites altogether.
"This is a thriving, multibillion-pound industry, and we're acting like there's nothing to see here," she says.
"It's horrific, and I think more people need to be speaking out about it - this gives parliamentarians the opportunity to discuss and debate it on the floor of the house."
In a statement, a Vivastreet spokesperson said: "Experts are clear that indicators that may suggest exploitation can have innocent explanations.
"For example, it is a fact that many sex workers use different names and personas, and 'touring' - moving for short periods of time to different areas to take bookings - is a well-known practice.
"We take safety extremely seriously and deploy industry-leading security measures to detect, report, and remove potentially exploitative content, including new requirements that all adult category advertisers must undergo age and ID verification."
AdultWork said: "Sexual exploitation is not tolerated in any form.
"We have strict internal policies in place to reinforce this and we are continually updating our internal systems for detecting accounts and requesting additional documents for evidence of legitimacy.
"We make it a priority to fully cooperate and comply with all law enforcement requests. Additionally, any indications or reports of trafficking are fully reviewed and if we find them to be suspicious, we proactively contact law enforcement."
Whether escorting platforms can be better regulated - or whether they should be outlawed entirely - remains a point of national debate.
But with mounting evidence of potential exploitation and growing political scrutiny, campaigners say inaction is no longer an option.
"These platforms are so poorly moderated and poorly regulated," Sarah says. "No one can sit behind a screen and know if someone's being coerced or is at the mercy of a predator."