As online recruitment and exploitation of child sex trafficking victims rise, Washington is doing little to stop it
By: KELSEY TURNER, INVESTIGATEWEST, courtesy of the Washington State Standard
Hannah Power was 16 when she first saw Max. One face among a sea of adult men that she scanned on her phone screen.
It started as a way to get her mind off things. In June 2022, the anxiety and depression that she experienced from a young age had engulfed her again. She’d quit ballet, her favorite hobby, after losing her passion for dance. She felt increasingly isolated at school and at home. So she downloaded Tinder, one of the most popular dating apps in the world, and entered a fake birth date to get around the requirement that users be at least 18.
She flicked through Max’s dating profile — 34 years old, a photo of him at the gym, a picture of a dog. She swiped right. A match, the app told her.
They exchanged phone numbers and coordinated a time to meet. He paid for the 45-minute Uber ride from her home in Federal Way to a hotel in Lynnwood, Hannah said.
Then, he encouraged her to do drugs, put on a little blue dress and perform in front of a video camera, broadcasting her to thousands of people on a popular porn site, she said.
He wasn’t forceful, Hannah remembers, which made her feel safer somehow. This type of activity was new to her, and he was older, more experienced. She cared what he thought of her.
“I knew that if he does these types of things, then he must have high standards,” Hannah said. “I just didn’t want him to think of me badly.”
Hannah’s experience that night — performing sex acts for hours on camera while being given powder and pills — left her physically sick, she said, throwing up throughout the next morning. But it wasn’t until the Lynnwood Police Department took on her case, following a report by her therapist, that she learned what it had meant: The detective suspected she’d been sex trafficked.
“She told me what crime was committed, and it felt unbelievable,” Hannah said.
Hannah thought sex trafficking meant being kidnapped, taken overseas, held hostage, beaten, sold.
Her experience highlights a gap in Washington’s efforts to stop child trafficking. Dating sites and social media have become the top recruitment locations for sex trafficking in the nation, according to data from the National Human Trafficking Hotline, yet state legislation has done little to address cases like Hannah’s. Meanwhile, local police departments like Lynnwood often lack the resources to investigate abusers who recruit kids online, and tech companies have been slow to enact safety measures that prevent online child sexual exploitation, experts and advocates say.
In 2021, the national hotline recorded 583 cases in which a sex trafficking victim’s recruitment location was known. Two-thirds of them were recruited over the internet, including 14% on dating sites and 16% on Facebook and Instagram, according to an analysis by Polaris, a nonprofit that operates the hotline.
“Unfortunately, social media and these dating apps — Tinder and Bumble and things like that — are just fertile ground for people who want to exploit minors,” said Alex Voorhees, the lead prosecutor for commercial sexual exploitation cases at the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Voorhees estimates at least half of her cases start with alleged abusers meeting their victims online.
The trend is increasing at an alarming rate, data shows.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline, the nation’s centralized reporting system for online exploitation of children, received 17,353 reports of child sex trafficking in 2023, a 47% increase since 2019.
“The growth in online child sexual exploitation is outpacing our capacity to respond,” the U.S. Department of Justice wrote in a 2023 report to Congress. Congress responded with the REPORT Act, a bipartisan bill passed in April to protect kids from online exploitation and further hold social media companies accountable.
On a state level, the Washington Legislature passed a bill in March that aims to increase prosecutions of trafficking cases and provide more resources for child victims. But the legislation doesn’t specifically address the online recruitment and exploitation of children. Age verification on dating apps didn’t come up in conversations among legislators, said state Sen. Manka Dhingra, D-Redmond, the bill’s lead sponsor.
“I think that’s definitely something we’re going to have to look at for the future,” Dhingra said.
Hannah’s 18 now, and the investigation into her case is ongoing. She knows very little about her alleged abuser — she doubts that Max is even his real name. The long wait for justice has left her feeling unsafe, blamed and unable to move on, she said.
“Some people are telling me that what is happening is traumatizing and stuff. But the way that the police and everyone is handling things, it’s just not seeming like…,” Hannah said, trailing off. “I just feel like no one’s really on my side.”
That night
The Lynnwood Police Department would not comment or release reports from Hannah’s case due to the ongoing investigation, and no charges have been filed. But Hannah says she remembers key points from that night. Her account matches the one she told her grandma right after it happened, her grandma confirmed to InvestigateWest, and police found evidence on Hannah’s phone supporting the statement that she gave them about the incident, according to her emails with the detective.
Hannah said it was a cool June night in 2022 when she slid into the back seat of an Uber to meet Max. On the drive, she tried not to think about the odd things he’d said to her.
Before the Uber arrived to pick her up, Max video-called her and had Hannah take her clothes off in front of the camera, she recalls. He told her not to wear underwear to the hotel and to text him a selfie with her tongue out. He said he was into the “porn star lifestyle.”
He’s not serious, Hannah told herself. He probably just likes the idea of it.
She arrived at the hotel in Lynnwood around 11 p.m., she said. Max led her up the elevator and into the room he’d booked, where she noticed a tripod set up with lighting and a camera. On the floor were two suitcases filled with costumes, underwear, swimsuits and high heels. A laptop hooked up to the TV in the background played porn.
Another young woman inside the room stood naked, Hannah said. The woman introduced herself as Kristy and said she was 19. Kristy was flirty, friendly, confident. Hannah liked her.
Max ushered Hannah to the desk in the room and showed her a white powder piled on its wood surface. A mix of ecstasy and Adderall, Hannah remembers him telling her. He wanted her to take some. Hannah was hesitant, but gave in, leaning down to snort the powder.
He had Hannah exchange her black leggings and wool sweater for a halter dress that plunged in a deep V down her chest, she said. He made sure she wasn’t recording anything on her phone and then told her to put her phone under the bed. She waited as he swiped on Tinder, searching for more matches, and periodically got up to rub more of the white powder over Hannah’s gums.
When Max asked for her ID to check her age, she got nervous. She didn’t have one, she admitted. She was only 16, not 18, like she’d indicated on her dating profile.
“I know he heard me. I know that for a fact,” Hannah said.
He let her stay.
Kristy, who had left the room, returned and asked Hannah if she wanted to smoke fentanyl with her. Hannah had turned down Kristy’s offers earlier that evening, she said, but this time she agreed. Hannah quickly began feeling heavy, her vision blurred, like she was in a dream.
The details in her memory become foggier after that, she said, but the main aspects of the exploitation, later supported by digital evidence gathered by police, stuck with her.
Max explained the rules. Hannah would perform with Kristy on Chaturbate, a popular online platform with uncensored live webcam shows. She remembers Max telling her that his livestream typically has nearly 7,000 viewers who can comment asking the two teenagers to perform for tips or request custom videos for an additional fee. Hannah would get some of the profits, he told her.
Hannah and Kristy sat in a chair in front of the camera while Max stood behind it, narrating and reading the comments aloud, Hannah said. Max then got a private request for a custom video of Hannah and Kristy performing sex acts with him. But as he filmed it, Hannah started bleeding, a side effect of her birth control.
Max stopped recording, seemingly annoyed. Hannah washed off the blood and got back on camera, but the mood was altered. Shortly after, around 3 a.m., Max ordered her an Uber back to Federal Way, Hannah said.
She took her phone from under the bed and walked down to the lobby alone. She never saw Max again.
The bare minimum
Federal and state law makes clear that minors under 18 cannot consent to engaging in commercial sex acts. State law also specifies that not knowing a victim’s age or believing a victim was older does not excuse the crime.
Protection of minors, however, becomes less clear on social media and dating apps.
While many dating apps have some form of identity verification, including video selfies and the use of artificial intelligence to flag suspicious activity, kids and traffickers continue to use these platforms with relative ease, police and prosecutors say.
“There’s a lot of predators that are on those sites all day long, every day, and their job is to just find the next person,” said Maurice Washington, a detective with the Seattle Police Department’s Human Trafficking Unit.
Match Group, the American tech company that owns Tinder and other popular online dating platforms like Hinge, Match and OkCupid, has endured criticisms from Congress and advocates in recent years for its failures to protect people from sexual predators on its apps. In February 2020, Congresswomen Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and Ann Kuster of New Hampshire sent a letter to Match Group urging the company to check users against sex offender registries and to be more transparent about its efforts to respond to reports of sexual violence on its platforms.
Amid these calls for action, Match Group announced a partnership in 2021 with a nonprofit called Garbo that would provide background checks for Tinder users. The partnership fell apart in 2023 following turnover in Match Group leadership and a rocky rollout of background check services, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Garbo founder and CEO Kathryn Kosmides describes the partnership’s end as a “values misalignment.” She worried the technology that Match Group wanted to use would provide a false sense of security for users, she said.
“From our perspective, Match Group doesn’t have any real mission, vision, and values — which we sadly realized when we launched in 2022,” Kosmides wrote in a statement to InvestigateWest. “After launching, to add insult to injury, Tinder chose not to pay us for seventeen months. The absence of internal support combined with a bizarre focus on a piece of technology that we and dozens of other experts warned against led us to exit the partnership.”
Match Group didn’t respond to InvestigateWest’s requests for comment.
Kosmides points out that companies like Match Group have few incentives to keep bad actors off their platforms, as their business relies on users signing up.
“That just creates kind of this bad incentivization model in the industry,” she said. “It’s very much a check-the-box, ‘what is the bare minimum that I have to legally do’ in a lot of these companies. And it’s very, very unfortunate.”
Tinder now plans to expand its optional verification process for users in the U.S. later this summer, according to Match Group. People will be able to upload government-issued identification, and Tinder will check that the ID matches the user’s photos and profile information. Once verified, users get a blue checkmark on their profiles.
But having users upload additional personal information to dating apps opens up a different debate about user safety: protection versus privacy. Match Group platforms and other dating apps like Grindr and Bumble have faced several lawsuits for alleged privacy violations in recent years, including accusations of storing users’ biometric data without proper consent and sharing sensitive information to third parties — in Grindr’s case, users’ HIV status.
“I think that there are more ways that platforms could be utilizing technology and safety and security other than, ‘Hey, give up your privacy,’” Kosmides said. “That’s a slippery slope.”
One way is by reporting misconduct to the CyberTipline run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The center’s staff reviews tips about child sex trafficking and other exploitation occurring online, and works to track down the incident’s location so that law enforcement can investigate, according to the center.
Reporting to the CyberTipline isn’t optional. Electronic service providers based in the U.S. — including Match Group and social media platforms like Facebook, SnapChat and Instagram — are required under federal law to report instances of “apparent child pornography.”
But of more than 1,600 electronic service providers registered to make reports to the tipline, only 245 made any in 2023, according to the center’s CyberTipline data report. Multi Media LLC, which owns Chaturbate, the porn site where Hannah says she was livestreamed, made 1,599 reports to the tipline in 2023, the data shows.
“The relatively low number of reporting companies and the poor quality of many reports marks the continued need for action from Congress and the global tech community,” the center’s report says.
The federal REPORT Act passed in April creates a new requirement for websites and social media platforms to report child sex trafficking to the CyberTipline. It also gives law enforcement more time to investigate and prosecute these crimes, and raises penalties for companies that fail to report exploitative content, with fines up to $850,000.
In the meantime, livestreaming platforms and dating apps “continue to be thriving” places for child sexual exploitation, said Washington, the Seattle police detective.
“It opens the door to a lot more people being vulnerable and victimized,” he said. “That’s just the landscape of it.”
Justice Process
Later that summer in 2022, Hannah found herself once again driven to Lynnwood to meet with a stranger, taking the same exit off of Interstate 5 and passing the same hotel where she met Max. This time, she continued another half mile to the Lynnwood Police Department.
She took an elevator up to the lobby and waited for Lynnwood Detective Jacqueline Arnett to lead her to an interview room. Seated at a small, bare table, she told Arnett about that night and gave up her phone to be analyzed for evidence.
Hannah’s case isn’t unusual as far as child sex trafficking goes. In addition to the relatively commonplace recruitment of kids over the internet, research shows that abusers often target girls like Hannah — a mixed-race teen coping with mental health issues — and often use drugs as a means to control their victims.
“It’s everything from alcohol and marijuana to methamphetamine, fentanyl, heroin,” said Voorhees, the King County prosecutor. “It obviously reduces that individual’s inhibitions. It reduces their ability to stand up for themselves.”
Yet while the circumstances of her case aren’t uncommon, progress remains slow. These types of investigations can take significant time and resources for police as they gather digital evidence and sift through large amounts of data. Investigations are made even more difficult by platforms that allow user anonymity, don’t retain messages or livestreamed videos, and operate outside the jurisdiction of the United States, police say.
As Hannah waited for any updates from the detective, she said the impact of that night began to sink in.
“I just slowly started becoming more and more depressed over what had happened,” she said.
When she went to stay with her grandma, Lauri Power, for a few weeks in Kitsap County, as she does intermittently, Hannah spent her days shut away in her bedroom on her laptop, Lauri says. She stopped going out in public. She’d cry at the smallest things.
“We didn’t know what she needed or what we could do to help her,” Lauri said. “She just seemed really, really distraught.”
Lauri tried to encourage Hannah to come out of her bedroom and spend less time alone. But her efforts didn’t seem to make much difference.
“I think that the situations she’s been in have not been healthy and probably will hang onto her her whole life and affect her. I know that much,” Lauri said.
By the time Hannah’s junior year of high school started in fall 2022, Hannah couldn’t motivate herself to go for more than a few days. She worried her classmates might recognize her from the video, which, as far as she knows, is still circulating somewhere online. A close family member died around the same time, sending Hannah deeper into depression.
A few months into the school year, she dropped out entirely. “I just didn’t see a point,” she said. She has no plans to go back.
Finally, in late December 2022, six months after the incident, Hannah got an email from Arnett, who declined an interview with InvestigateWest due to the ongoing investigation. The detective had reviewed Hannah’s phone and didn’t find any identifying information about the suspect.
“This case is currently closed,” Arnett wrote, adding to contact her if Hannah remembers additional information that could help with the case. “Take care!”
It must not have been a big deal after all, Hannah told herself. “I kind of just thought I was overexaggerating that whole situation,” she said.
Shortly after, however, the department reopened her case. The police had found other possible victims and identified a suspect, according to Hannah’s emails with Arnett.
But by then, Hannah’s faith in the justice process had waned.
“They were willing to just close it and not even investigate,” she said.
She’d hoped that by working with the police, she would feel safer and less alone, maybe connect with a community of other survivors, she said.
Instead, after two years, she feels like she has more questions than answers. She’s unsure if her case will be prosecuted or if she’ll ever know the identity of her alleged abuser. She wonders about Kristy, if the teen had been a victim, too. She hardly leaves her house anymore, afraid Max could have connections in the area.
“I just don’t feel safe around anyone honestly,” she said.
She wishes she could move on and start fresh, like her family wants her to. But she still remembers the social media handle that Max used that night. She looked it up recently and found over 5,000 followers on X. She scrolled past faces, videos and livestreams of other young women on his channels across various porn sites.
Then she panicked, scared he would somehow see that she’d checked his account, and quickly closed the tab.
InvestigateWest (invw.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reporter Kelsey Turner can be reached at kelsey@invw.org.
