Catching rats and other vermin starts with using the right bait, and when Detective Dan Haueter sets the trap, they come scurrying out of the shadows.
Haueter is a detective with the East Palestine Police Department and a member of the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force.
What he catches are especially repugnant creatures. And the bait they’re most drawn to are ads that Haueter posts on known prostitution websites — specifically, ads that appear to be posted by a mom offering herself and her underage daughter for sex.
What usually follows is an exchange of messages with interested men that concludes with a meeting time and place. When the dupe shows up — and it’s always a guy — Haueter or his fellow officers are there to arrest him.
Haueter doesn’t limit himself — he and other task force members post multiple types of sex ads — but his mother-underage daughter ads generate the most hits. For comparison: During a three-day period in 2022, a mother-daughter ad he posted elicited more than twice the number of replies (67) than an ad for a 15-year-old runaway (32).
“After they’re arrested, and sometimes even during the undercover conversation, some of these guys admit that sex with a mother and young daughter has always been a fantasy,” Haueter said. “They say it’s on their bucket list. They actually use the term ‘bucket list.’ ”
Haueter has spent the past 18 years investigating cybercrimes against minors. He has been recognized nationally for his work and has had successful prosecutions in 18 states, Japan and the United Kingdom.
He will discuss his work at the Attorney General’s 2024 Human Trafficking Summit on Aug. 7 at the Hyatt Regency Columbus. His workshop — “Unmasking the Shadows in Undercover Operations: The Hidden Costs of Men Buying Sex” — addresses the disturbing reality of familial sex trafficking, the often-unseen victims, and the clandestine world of undercover advertisements.
About 20 years ago, just as the anti-trafficking movement was gaining traction in the United States, Haueter was in the early stages of his law enforcement career. At the time, America Online (AOL) chat rooms were wildly popular, but many of the rooms were sexual in nature — and some were virtual back alleys that attracted men seeking parents willing to traffic their kids.
“These rooms were always full,” Haueter said. “You have to remember that AOL limited the number of people in a chat room to 25 or something like that. There were always people waiting to get in. So, I started posting dad-daughter profiles and mom-daughter profiles in the chat rooms. And, I mean, they were by far the most popular profiles we put up.”
Stunned by the apparent demand, Haueter began researching family-facilitated human trafficking. What he learned is that the parent behind the depravity — sometimes a prostitute herself — is often pimping the child to support a drug habit.
That’s not always true, though. In one case, he said, a mother in the state of Washington trafficked her young daughter in exchange for tennis shoes.
It isn’t clear how common sex trafficking of minors is. Understandably, the sex trafficking of minors by a family member is even harder to pin down.
Haueter’s experience provides a limited view, and mostly from the demand side.
Since 2021, his ads on prostitution websites featuring underage females have resulted in 106 arrests, and his ads for familial sex — typically mother-daughter sex — have netted 73 arrests. In both cases, they were all men.
A research study in the journal Criminal Justice Review concluded that statistics on the prevalence of domestic sex trafficking of minors — a category that doesn’t distinguish between minors trafficked by family or by outsiders — “are elusive, often presented as crude estimates, and not based on a strong foundation.”
The nature of the crime works against detection. Victims are often very young with no sense that they’re being exploited. Further, the person grooming the victims — maybe even abusing them — and then selling them for sex is often the very person they depend on for food, shelter, clothing and even love, or what they see as love, anyway.
Still, the piecemeal statistics that do exist on familial sex trafficking are shocking.
The Criminal Justice Review article noted the following:
- A 2022 report from Hawaii found that in 25% of child trafficking cases, the first trafficker was a family member.
- A report from Minnesota based on 2018 data found that 45% of victims were recruited by someone in the family and that 24% were actually trafficked by a relative.
- A 2020 report from the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services identified a “caretaker perpetrator” in 47% of child trafficking cases.
Haueter’s goal in posting internet ads is to reduce demand, given that less demand means fewer victims. This approach reflects a radical shift in the fight against human trafficking in general — going after the buyers as well as the perpetrators, while offering help to the survivors.
The websites where Haueter posts ads — all are foreign-based prostitution sites — allow users to specify regions.
“So I’ll post for Youngstown, Pittsburgh, Warren and New Castle because they’re within a half-hour, 40-minute drive,” he said.
The ads attract attention not only from people in the immediate area but also people living hours away, and from motorists and truckers passing through.
“We arrested a guy recently who drove two hours from Erie,” Haueter said. “And we got a guy from upstate New York who was on his way to Akron for a Porsche festival. He literally made a detour because he said he’d always fantasized about a mom and daughter.”
In Ohio, an adult arrested for soliciting sex with a minor — also known as importuning — is charged with a felony. The degree of felony depends on several factors, including the victim’s age. In addition to serving prison time and paying possible fines, those found guilty must register as a sex offender.
Because of the volume of felony cases resulting from the mother-underage daughter ads he posts and the backlog it creates in the court system, Haueter periodically switches to ads focused on adults. The ads are still intended to curb demand, but adults arrested for soliciting sex with another adult are charged with misdemeanors, making the disposition of their cases simpler and faster.
He eventually switches back to ads featuring only moms and underage daughters, complete with fake photos he generates — the trap that snares the big rats, Haueter said.
“I find that the guys we get with the mom-underage daughter ads are the ones who have the vast amounts of child pornography,” he said. “We got a guy in 2021. He had something like 45,000 images of child pornography that he was distributing, including photos of his niece as he sexually abused her. He lived 20 minutes from us, in Saint Clair Township.
“Thanks to the ad, we got him.”
The Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force is led by the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office and includes resources from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, New Waterford Police Department, Cortland Police Department, Austintown Police Department, Youngstown Police Department, the Ohio Investigative Unit and the Ohio State Highway Patrol. The task force is one of seven human trafficking task forces supported by the Attorney General’s Ohio Organized Crime Investigation Commission.