Read Getting Screwed for Free Online Page A

Washington, D.C.,for nine years. “I really enjoy it,” he says. “It’s been a challenge, since I’m a parent and I wasn’t comfortable doing incalls, having people to my home. So I have a separate incall apartment ten minutes from my house.”
    In response to a question, Dave explains that he requires a 50 percent deposit on all his appointments because that weeds out people who are not serious about meeting with him. “I try to stay away from credit cards and PayPal,” he says. “PayPal froze my account and kept a couple thousand dollars for a year. So I don’t use PayPal anymore.”
    Dave says he usually only accepts cash deposits, and he asks clients to FedEx them to him. “It’s not kosher to send cash through FedEx,” he says. “But in my case, I live a little outside of rules. I recently had $6,000 sent to me via FedEx. I have a P.O. box where it is sent to.”
    Other sex workers mention a number of vendors, such as MoneyPak, Green Dot, and Intuit, through which they have had deposits sent to them anonymously. Donia Christine chimes in: “If you have a bank account through Chase, they have a prepay account, and you can use completely anonymous email that doesn’t indicate your name. Amazon gift card is another good idea. They will send it to any email you give them.”
    One sex worker asks how to go about branding herself. Christine suggests that the brand can be whatever her expertise or specialty is. “I don’t think people give enough thought to this when they put themselves out there, so they get lost in a sea of adult sex workers,” she says. “It’s about identifying the thing that you’re the expert at. You have to build on what you’re most authentic at.”
    One of the other panelists, a pretty, light-skinned woman whose black hair is tinged with green highlights, agrees. “You have to ask two questions first: who do I want to be while I’m doing this, and what kind of clients do I want to have,” says the panelist, who had introduced herself earlier as Sophie Laurent. “You want a brand that will attract the clients you want.”
    Heads nod, and around the room people scribble furiously on notepads or tablets. Someone strolling by might think they had stumbled onto a typical corporate conference, and in one very real sense, theywould be right. The women and men in this room are serious about their work and intent on building successful careers. They are the new generation of sex workers, whose lives have been shaped and transformed by the Internet, for better or for worse. If Julie Moya had been in the room that day, she would have felt right at home.

Busted in Sin City
    NEVADA’S TWO-FACED APPROACH TO SEX WORK
    T he Great Recession hit Anna and her husband hard. They had recently purchased a house in South Florida, and when the automotive company she worked for went bankrupt, Anna lost her job. Her husband was in graduate school and couldn’t help out much. “I still had $50,000 in student loans to pay off and a mortgage,” she says. “The economy was so bad, I couldn’t even get a job at Wendy’s.”
    Anna had seen the HBO series on the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Nevada and was intrigued by the idea of getting paid to do something she already enjoyed. “One night, I said to my husband, ‘If they’re having that much fun and making that money, maybe it’s something I should look into,’ ” she recalls. She and her husband had been together since college, and they often enjoyed recreational sex with other couples. “Being swingers, sex was never something that we attached to love,” Anna says. “So I figured I might as well get paid for doing it.”
    Her husband was supportive of the idea. “He actually finds it exciting,” she says. “It turns him on a bit.” So Anna, who was then twenty-seven, did some