The plaintiffs claim that without the payment processors, which include CCBill, Epoch, and several others that process "high-risk" merchant payments, GirlsDoPorn would not have been a commercial enterprise to begin with.#girlsdoporn #payments #porn
GirlsDoPorn Victims Sue Major Payment Processors, Claiming They Enabled Sex Trafficking
Three victims of sex trafficking ring GirlsDoPorn brought a complaint against multiple companies that processed payments for the criminal organization, claiming that without their payment services, GirlsDoPorn would never have existed.GirlsDoPorn was a criminal enterprise that coerced primarily high-school and college aged women with no experience in the adult industry into appearing in pornographic videos, by convincing them they were signing up for modeling gigs and telling them the videos would never be posted online. The ring was masterminded by Michael Pratt, who alongside multiple co-conspirators was charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion in 2019. A federal judge sentenced Pratt to 27 years in prison last month, and most of his co-conspirators have also been sentenced to years or decades in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.
The lawsuit, brought by three women who appeared in the videos, seeks to become a class-action complaint on behalf of anyone who appeared in at least one pornographic video on GirlsDoPorn and its sister site GirlsDoToys between 2009 and 2019—which could include up to 300 more individuals, the complaint estimates. They allege that CCBill, Epoch, First Data Merchant Services, Total System Services, and a number of unnamed banks knowingly participated in GirlsDoPorn’s sex trafficking venture by providing it payment services.
Michael Pratt, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader, Sentenced to 27 Years in Prison
Michael James Pratt was sentenced to federal prison on charges of sex trafficking connected to the GirlsDoPorn crime ring. “He turned my pain into profit, my life into currency,” said one victim.404 MediaSamantha Cole
The complaint was filed on Monday by several attorneys who’ve represented GirlsDoPorn victims since the civil case which went to trial in 2019. The defendant payment service companies generated “millions in fees for themselves and tens of millions for GirlsDoPorn,” the complaint claims. “By doing so, Defendants turned the victims’ sex acts into ‘commercial sex acts,’ a crucial element of sex trafficking under Section 1591 [the U.S. sex trafficking legal code]. Without Defendants’ payment network, GirlsDoPorn would have never been able to exist.”CCBill is one of the most popular handlers of online porn payments and subscriptions. Epoch, another longtime service in the adult industry, was GirlsDoPorn’s payment facilitator, which acts as a gateway between credit card companies and merchants like porn sites. Total System Services and First Data were GirlsDoPorn’s payment processors, the complaint alleges, while the yet-unnamed banks settled the payments for GirlsDoPorn.
“Given the integral role of payment processing to the business of Internet pornography, GirlsDoPorn would never have become or remained a viable enterprise absent Defendants’ participation in the sex trafficking venture,” the plaintiffs argue. “GirlsDoPorn would never have achieved the level of success it did without Defendants actively assisting, supporting, and facilitating its unlawful business with streams of revenue.”
The plaintiffs claim that the defendants, as part of running their businesses, should have known GirlsDoPorn was a criminal enterprise, pointing to GirlsDoPorn’s own website and messaging as evidence: “Indeed, when it was launched, GirlsDoPorn’s website openly bragged about using fraud to lure a victim under the guise of a modeling advertisement—’She contacted us regarding an ad I had placed for beauty models wanted, having no idea it was actually for adult videos instead ha :)’” the complaint states. The plaintiffs also point to Reddit posts made by GirlsDoPorn victims talking about being abused, and the boasting GirlsDoPorn operators did on the website about how the women were “first-timers,” caught in their bait-and-switch scheme who would shoot porn for the “studio” exclusively, and weren’t part of the adult industry as a career choice.
“As the years went by, Defendants ignored dozens of red flags indicating GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking venture,” the complaint states. By 2017, they allege, defendants “could no longer feign ignorance of GirlsDoPorn’s illegal business practices” because the plantiffs served the defendants a subpoena as part of the civil case in San Diego seeking records related to GirlsDoPorn.
The defendants continued processing payments for the organization until October 2019, the plaintiffs claim, at which point everyone involved was arrested or indicted on federal sex trafficking charges and the websites went offline. “Only then did Defendants stop processing payments forGirlsDoPorn, but it was not by choice,” the complaint claims. “Any ignorance Defendants may have had to GirlsDoPorn’s illegal business practices prior to October 2019 is a direct result of Defendants’ own negligence, recklessness, or willful desire to remain ignorant, which is no defense under Section 1595.”
In addition to certifying the class action and a jury trial, the plaintiffs seek damages exceeding $1 million for each member of the class, restitution for what CCBill and Epoch earned from GirlsDoPorn, punitive damages, and attorney fees.
CCBill and Epoch did not respond to requests for comment. Fiserv, which owns First Data, and Total System Services did not immediately respond to comment requests.
In sentencing memos and exhibits, Pratt's attorney paints of picture that points at Pratt's abusive father, his ADHD, his co-conspirators, the entire pornography industry, and the victims themselves.
In sentencing memos and exhibits, Prattx27;s attorney paints of picture that points at Prattx27;s abusive father, his ADHD, his co-conspirators, the entire pornography industry, and the victims themselves.#girlsdoporn
Ahead of Sentencing, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader Michael Pratt Attempts to Seem Reformed
Days away from finding out his sentence for sex trafficking as the ringleader of Girls Do Porn, Michael James Pratt and his attorney are attempting to paint a picture of a man reformed behind bars, through personal letters and certificates from classes he has passed inside prison.GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking operation posing as a porn studio that Pratt ran from 2009 to 2020. By lying to the women they recruited, telling them that they were being hired for “modeling” gigs and adult video shoots that would never be distributed outside offline private collections, GirlsDoPorn’s operators coerced young, inexperienced women into shooting rough, hours-long sex scenes in San Diego hotel rooms. The videos were distributed on massive porn sites including Pornhub, where GirlsDoPorn was a content partner for years. Women who have come forward for the civil and federal trials against GirlsDoPorn have said their lives were upended by Pratt’s criminal enterprise.
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Were you a victim of GirlsDoPorn, or do you have knowledge of how it operated? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.Pratt has been in custody since he was arrested in Spain on December 21, 2022 and extradited to the US. Prior to that, he’d been in hiding since fleeing the US in the middle of a massive civil trial in 2019, where 22 victims sued him and his co-conspirators for $22 million (a case they won). Right after his disappearance, Pratt was charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for years. He initially pleaded not guilty to these charges in 2024, but changed his plea to guilty in June.
Exhibits filed by Pratt’s lawyer Brian White on Sept. 1 include letters, mostly anonymous, from people who knew him when he was younger asking the judge for leniency, including his sister and mother. “Mike's father, Steve Pratt, was not a good role model. He was a drinker and had a controlling personality. I caught Steve smacking Michael uncontrollably on a couple of occasions. I stopped it immediately,” his mother wrote.
“Three years of prison has given me enough time to think about this entire situation,” Pratt wrote in a letter to the court submitted on Monday. “Trying to understand things from other points of view has given me insight into how some victims were really affected by these videos. I put myself in the shoes of the women who participated, trying to see what they have gone through. I myself have been a victim of bullying and know how rough that is on the psyche. I cannot imagine the trauma experienced by a video being published where friends and family could come across it.”
We know, in fact, from years of testimonies and interviews—many while it was still unsafe for them to come forward, when the consequences of speaking up about this abuse risked compounding trauma and continued, violent harassment—how Pratt’s victims were impacted by his actions.
Several of the women who’ve testified in the civil and federal trials, and came forward to speak on the record to journalists, reported violent assault to the point of bleeding or injury, being trapped inside the hotel rooms with no clothing, and being lied to by Pratt and his co-conspirators about who would be able to see the videos. As one of the women targeted by GirlsDoPorn told me in 2021: “There were a few points where I was just like please, I need to stop, I need to stop, because it was just so much pain. I said, I can’t go on anymore… At that point I could have said nothing. I could have been mute. My voice was just not heard at all.” Another woman said while testifying during the civil trial: “They put furniture in front of the door, so what was I going to do—jump over the balcony?” GirlsDoPorn’s attorney at the time, Aaron Sadock, asked that woman on the stand if she had fun. “No, I did not have fun!” she said, crying.
Kristy Althaus, who sued Pornhub in 2023 for disseminating the videos, claimed that Pratt’s conspirators held her captive in a hotel room and filmed her being raped for nine to 10 hours, barricading the doors, ignoring her bleeding and cries, forcing her to consume alcohol, marijuana, and Xanax, and spiking her drink with oxycodone. According to that complaint, when she refused to return for another “shoot,” Pratt threatened her and her family, texting, “You have it coming for u,” “I will cut and kill you bitch,” and “You better be here by noon shoot 2tomorrow or your graveyard,” according to screenshots of texts from Althaus’s complaint.
For many of these women, the trauma and harassment didn’t stop once they left the hotel rooms. In some cases, they were disowned by their families and friends, harassed endlessly, struggled to find jobs in previously-prestigious careers and found it difficult to date or trust anyone intimately again.In the defendant’s sentencing memorandum, White blames Pratt’s alcoholic, abusive father and his own ADHD; throws his co-conspirators under the bus; accuses the entire pornography industry of being “exploitative and dehumanizing;” and asserts again that the women lied in their testimonies.
The memo paints a picture of Pratt as a precocious child with a difficult upbringing in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he taught himself how to use computers and eventually learned about websites and affiliate marketing. “Mr. Pratt began looking for better ways to generate income, and through the associations he made in the affiliate marketing business, he learned that making videos to direct internet traffic to pornography sites could be financially successful,” the memo says. But when he tried to make a pornography business himself, he wasn’t very good at it, blaming the banning of Craigslist’s erotic ads in 2009 for his difficulties in finding models. He claims he posted ads seeking “models” as a way around the ban.
Pratt's lawyer asserts in the memorandum that his employee, Andre Reuben “Dre” Garcia, the main “actor” in most of the GirlsDoPorn videos, stopped when the women told him to stop. “She said, ‘stop, it’s not going to work.’ Garcia stopped,” the memo says. “The model offered to try a second time and again told Garcia to stop because it wasn’t going to work. Again, Garcia stopped. That was the end of it. Forcing a model to do something against her will was not Mr. Pratt’s intention.” He also claims that when Pratt heard complaints about Garcia from models, Pratt “instituted certain safety measures” like locking the hotel room refrigerators and putting more cameras in the room. Those “safety measures” didn’t include firing Garcia, however.
When he’s arguing that he should have a lower sentence than Garcia’s 20 years, Pratt acknowledges that Garcia sexually assaulted many of these women. “Garcia physically raped a number of the models before and after the video shoots, and multiple women were forced to continue having sex with him on video despite their pleas to stop due to pain or because the sex went beyond the scope of what they had agreed to do,” the memorandum states.
The exhibits filed as part of the memo also attempt to show how productive and busy Pratt has been in prison. His attorney submitted nearly 100 “certificates of completion” issued by the learning platform Edovo, which offers classes for incarcerated people. The classes Pratt passed include “Embracing Unexpected Change,” “Doing Time With Jesus,” several anger management courses, “Media Relations Foundations,” marketing classes for LinkedIn and Facebook, “Augmented Reality Marketing,” “Human Trafficking in the United States: The Truth and What You Can Do About It,” “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” and multiple cooking classes, including “Soups” and “Sauces.”
Federal prosecutors seek a 22-year prison sentence, while Pratt’s defense countered with around 17 years; Judge Janis L. Sammartino will hand Pratt his sentence on Monday in San Diego.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…Prosecutors want to send GirlsDoPorn ringleader to prison for 22 years
Michael James Pratt pleaded guilty in June to charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking in the GirlsDoPorn case.City News Service (Times of San Diego)
'She Turned Ghost White:' How a Ragtag Group of Friends Tracked Down a Sex Trafficking Ringleader
Michael Pratt hid a massive sex trafficking ring in plain sight on PornHub. On the run from the FBI, an unexpected crew of ex-military, ex-intelligence officers and a lawyer tracked him down using his love of rare sneakers and crypto.#girlsdoporn
