Fifteen men were arrested Friday in a police sting meant to curtail demand for prostitution, according to Vancouver police.
Cyber crime detectives placed a phony advertisement in the escort section of Backpage.com and received responses from men who were willing to pay money for sexual services, police said.
An undercover officer who posed as a prostitute arranged for the men to go to a room in an unnamed hotel near the Vancouver Mall, where they thought they would meet a prostitute. Instead, they met police detectives who arrested them, police said. They were booked into the Clark County Jail and then released.
The sting began at noon and ended at 9 p.m. While they nabbed a total of 15 suspected “johns,” the detectives said they were unable to keep up with the high number of responses to the advertisement.
