A long-term investigation conducted by York Regional Police has culminated in the arrest of over 104 men.On Friday, York Police announced that their four-year project, dubbed Project Raphael, was completed. The project saw men contact advertisements for escorts online who were then told that the person they were negotiating with was a child. The officers would then pursue the men who continued to negotiate sex with the officer posing as a girl aged 13 to 16 years old.
Advertisement
The ages of the arrested men spans from 18 to 71 and the arrests took place from 2014 to 2017.During a news conference, Det. Sgt. Thai Truong said that the men were offering to pay between $80 and $300 for sexual encounters with the fabricated minors."Unfortunately, there was a lot of married men. Occupations from all walks of life, ethnicities from all walks of life," Truong said.Sixty-four of the 104 cases are still before the court—32 of the men arrested have put forward guilty pleas and are serving three- to seven-month sentences. Susan Orlando, with the Attorney General's human trafficking prosecution team, said in the news conference that these sentences were "significant.""When you consider the fact that all of these men are first time offenders, they had stable jobs, and families and not the type of people who usually see in the criminal justice system," she said."So for a first offence, to get those sentences, it's a significant sentence."Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.