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Registration, the agent says he obtained Dr. Smith's bank account
records and noted that Dr. Smith was making payments to
backpage.com
, a site the agent writes is "commonly used by individu-
als to offer sexual services in exchange for money."
After getting records from the website of the individual adver-
tisements connected to Dr. Smith's bank account, the agent
believed "the ads paid for by Smith were for prostitution
services."
The agent says the records of
backpage.com
showed that
the advertisements with connections to Dr. Smith's bank
account were also linked to complexes where Dr. Smith
either rented or leased apartments or condominiums,
and also traced back to computers at Dr. Smith's home or
to facilities he worked at, including Overlake Medical
Center.
"The results lead me to believe that Smith was utiliz-
ing his personal or professional Internet access to post
these commercial-sex advertisements," writes the agent.
At first, Dr. Smith used his own name while posting the
ads, the agent writes, before switching to an alias, "Jesse
Blue." In more than a year, court documents say, he paid
around $10,000 to post 116 advertisements on
backpage.com
.
$426,000 in one year alone
Investigators then say that
throughout 2013, several agents
used these online advertise-
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