Olesja Lagašina told Vikerraadio that sex workers have mostly moved online in more recent years.

Lagašina has been conducting some investigations of her own into the matter when penning an article for Äripäev, and had contacted online platform operators which host ads providing such services.

"The largest platform operates in the Czech Republic. They did not respond, so we called Latvia, where another owner operates a smaller platform. They make money from that. It is an international business and is highly profitable. The larger platform earns about seven million [euros] a year, even though the company essentially employs only a couple of people," Lagašina noted.

The main source of revenue is the ads themselves, which are paid – they take a cut of the service provider's fee, which Lagašina said could be as much as €300 or more per hour, "depending on what is being offered."

The flip side of this is the service providers themselves, who in some cases can be vulnerable people, including those who have fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Lagašina said she had spoken to one such woman.

"It was a very sad experience. She told me her story: She is from Ukraine, there is a war going on and she has lost her job. Her mother is unwell and requires treatment, and she is earning money for that because she simply has no other way out. She is a woman in a socially vulnerable position, who genuinely has no other option. That is why they travel to another country, so that no one will know them or knows what they do."

One such other country is Estonia; Lagašina said that in the course of her research she spoke to people in an apartment block who came to believe one of the apartments was being used as a base for selling sex.

"A source told me there was an apartment that was allegedly being used as a brothel and that suspicious people were coming and going. We began monitoring it and spoke to the neighbors. When they moved out of the apartment, we thought about how to continue investigating the issue and called one woman who had posted an ad on a website," Lagašina went on.

It turned out that there are a great many such advertisements on online platforms. Legal issues include those relating to residency and work permits, and to "pimping," which is illegal in Estonia.

Many service providers "may not have residence or work permits," Lagašina noted.

As for pimping, this is harder to prove. A service provider may state that they are working for themselves and wholly by their own choice, which they may be – or may have been at the beginning, before they came up on organized criminals' radar. On the other hand, many service providers work through agencies, which can bring a veneer of legality.

"The women claim they operate independently, and that is precisely the problem, as that is not punishable on its own. Pimping would be punishable," the journalist pointed out. "If we look at these online platforms, there are a lot of agencies there. In my view, an agency is an intermediary, and facilitating prostitution is a criminal offense, but the police say it might simply be an advertising agency. They say that if they shut these down, the problem would only worsen. Finland did go down that route and it did not solve the problem at all; they simply move somewhere else," Lagašina concluded.

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