United Arab Emirates? Singapore? Japan? No, the latest is the United States of America! That’s right. And why? What is going on? What is Craigslist Adult Listing section like?

A certain section of Craigslist called “adult services”  was censored out last Friday on all U.S.-based pages. The listings continue are still outside the United States even in countries that are a state of some certain religion. It was a complete surprise to everyone with no warning from Craigslist that the United States took such a stand.

Human sex trafficking is a real threat to the lives of thousands of children, women, and other people’s lives. The parents of children in undeveloped areas of the world are scoped out by “headhunters” who offer the parents money to put their children to work in other countries, but what the parents are not aware of … is how they will make a living and the fact that room, board and drugs are the main “pay” for the services of the women and children.

Craigslist has been found in many cases to be the location where human sex trafficking rings run their sales. Craigslist usually runs ads for anyone anywhere in the world free, but it does charge $10 US dollars per ad in the adult services listings.

Online and television news stations and departments of law use the Craigslist ads to research, publicize and/or arrest “culprits.” CBS news, CNN, PBS, and many social philanthropic and nonprofit organizations have shared some of their research via video, blogs, and television documentaries.

Human trafficking is usually conducted with objectives of forced labor, prostitution, domestic engineering, debt bondage, farming, factory work, nail salons, strip club dancing, and tanning salons. Those who are “enslaved” usually are hired under the table with not much more than a few dollars, some drugs, food and a place to stay, often threatened if they should dare to leave.

A Hawaii federal grand jury during the week of September 4, 2010 indicted the owner of Global Horizons Manpower Inc. and four of its employees of participating in a conspiracy to force the labor of at least 400 Thai nationals. Their President Mordechai Orian, an Israeli national, turned himself in to the FBI the same week. This is just one of many situations involving different types of human trafficking in the United States.

Craigslist received a letter from 17 state attorneys general with explicit command that the company shut down the adult services listing. They cited a case of two young girls who were trafficked for sex through the Craigslist website. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a democrat and a signee of last month’s letter, said in a statement Saturday he welcomed Craigslist’s apparent decision to close the section and said he was seeking to verify the site’s official policy going forward.

Craigslist’s adult services listings with its $10 per ad make up about 1/3 of their annual revenue. The services used to be called erotic and were changed to “adult” in the last few years.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster explained, in an August 2010 blog post, that the company filters more ads than anyone imagines especially in the Adult Services listings, pointing out its lawyers had rejected some 700,000 inappropriate ads to date, and suggested its methods could offer a model for the entire industry. He clearly showed how upset he was about the unplanned CNN video interview of Craigslist’s founder Craig Newmark at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPg0k6hTZHo. Newmark is famous for his low-key, down to earth, geeky, friendly demeanor.

So this still young, upstart (only 15 years old) service gets to take the hit for adult service listings while perhaps other sites such as Playboy, Hustler, Xhamster, Facebook, MoviePost, and other platforms, services, and products make even more money from the same services and have been around/or maybe even been around longer than Craiglist.

This news was first reported on one of our favorite social news sites: Techcrunch.

Techistan is not attempting to state that the following video does or does not have a relation to Craigslist Adult Listing, but instead is shared as an example of television news on the subject… in this case, Las Vegas.

The company who runs Techistan, Super Technologies, Inc., once had an email discussion with Craigslist regarding work together to combat a certain criminal trend in the IP communications industry that combined Craigslist with DID. They were extremely helpful in stopping the activity. So Techistan can vouch for this star on the integrity belt on Craigslist.