What This Is About
The Paris public prosecutor has opened an investigation into France’s largest classified advertising platform for escort and sexual services. SWI swissinfo.ch reported on this on September 11, 2026, and RTS a day earlier.
According to the reports, the platform — formerly known as Sexemodel, now Meslibertines — receives around 430,000 visits per day and has over 45,000 active listings. The investigation was triggered by France’s child protection ombudsperson: several hundred profiles allegedly involve minors. The technical infrastructure is located in Switzerland and is operated by a person with a Swiss passport living in Dubai. France has therefore submitted a mutual legal assistance request to Switzerland. The platform itself takes the position that it is purely a hosting service provider for third-party listings.
What This Means for the Industry
This case demonstrates how dependent sex workers are on infrastructure over which they have no control. If a platform is shut down or servers are seized, listings, reviews, message histories, and regular clients disappear overnight — even for those who work completely legally. And data from a seizure ends up in case files, regardless of whether the individual person had anything to do with the allegation.
There’s also the issue of legal geography: In France, purchasing sexual services has been illegal since 2016, while in Switzerland, sex work is legal. Swiss servers have therefore long been considered a safe haven. A mutual legal assistance request puts exactly this assumption to the test.
In practical terms, this means: don’t keep contacts, references, and appointment schedules exclusively on a single platform, but maintain your own copies. And be prepared for age verification and listing checks to become stricter everywhere — which for those working legitimately mainly means more compliance requirements.
How dependent is your daily work on a single platform — and what would you lose if it went offline tomorrow?