Vice Ring Busts

Told by Detective Garcia, Florida Police Department: 

Sex trafficking operating out of local massage parlors has been a long standing problem here in Florida. Over the last 18 months, we’ve seen an unprecedented number of reports and busts. Our County formed a specialized Vice unit with a clear mission: identify and dismantle these illicit operations. 

"Within 15 minutes of using VIXN, we had dozens of new leads."

Detective Garcia

The VIXN team had been in touch with our Captain and demonstrated how the tool assists with lead generation. Most players in these trafficking investigations are ghosts, so whatever leads we could generate would be a huge help. 

We focused VIXN on a massage spa that we had just received reports on. We ran its search tools on 2 targets: one on the business itself and the other on the presumed owner, a person who had recently entered the country with barely a traceable footprint. Results returned fast and were impressive. From our initial limited search inputs, VIXN located hundreds of data points.

VIXN linked our targets to 8 addresses, 3 emails, 4 social media profiles, and 12 key network connections. One of these connections led us right to another suspicious massage parlor that had been on our radar. 

VIXN also found a Yelp page associated with the suspected sex-trafficking parlor. Instead of having to read through hundreds of reviews, VIXN extracted these posts automatically and highlighted those that referenced prostitution activities going back to 2018. We then ran a VIXN search on each author of these reviews to identify them for follow-up interviews.

Within 15 minutes of using VIXN, we had dozens of new leads in just this one investigation and a new way of finding sex-trafficking claims through Yelp reviews.

This experience has been a game-changer. VIXN is now a part of our investigation processes. The speed and depth of the intelligence gathered has given us a significant advantage in our ongoing efforts to protect our community.

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