Second of two articles

A man texts an online ad for sex.

He gets a text back: “Hi Papi. Would u like to go on a date?” There’s a conversation: what he’d like the woman to do, when and where to meet, how much he will pay.

After a few minutes, the texts stop. It’s not unexpected — women offering commercial sex usually text with several potential buyers at once. So the man, too, usually texts several women at once.

What he doesn’t expect is this: He is texting not with a woman but with a computer program, a piece of artificial intelligence that has taught itself to talk like a sex worker.

He doesn’t expect the text a few days later with a picture of a man sitting in jail, and this message: “This is the New York Police Department. Your response to an online ad for prostitution has been logged. Offering to pay or paying someone for sexual conduct is a crime and punishable by incarceration up to 7 years. The NYPD posts hundreds of decoy advertisements that are indistinguishable from the real thing. People who show up in response to our ads are likely to get arrested.”

He doesn’t know which ad he texted triggered the message. He doesn’t know what could happen next. But he knows the police have his number, in every sense.

“You’re not anonymous,” said Lt. Christopher Sharpe, who runs the department’s Human Trafficking Team. “We may have the ability to find out who you are and what social media you like to use. We are considering engaging people on their social media.

“The hard-core people are still going to show up, and we will get this person,” Lieutenant Sharpe continued. “But plenty of people are on the fence. If they think they can get away with it without any harm, they may try to show up. Our segment is really the fence-sitters. If they get this message, we’ve knocked them out of the market. One guy responded: ‘I can’t stop thinking about everything I can lose. My fiancé, my job, my friends. I have something to lose in this.’”

Last week, I wrote about the efforts of Truckers Against Trafficking to encourage commercial drivers to spot trafficking and call a national hotline if they see the signs. Sex trafficking is a huge, lucrative industry. It’s global and local — in ordinary American towns. Helping the victims and putting trafficking rings out of business is lifesaving work. But by itself, that can’t end trafficking. If it’s successful, the reduction in supply could even make sex trafficking more lucrative.

“If the money is still there to make, sex traffickers will find another victim,” said Robert Beiser, founder of Seattle Against Slavery, a 10-year-old organization that recently introduced a different chatbot, called Freedom Signal. “That’s why disrupting buyers is so important. We don’t want this thing to be an endless hamster wheel.”

Targeting buyers is not new. Police departments have long put undercover female officers onto the street and arrested their would-be customers. The Human Trafficking team still does this. (It also investigates leads about sex trafficking. Lieutenant Sharpe said his unit runs about 400 such cases each year; the average age of victims found was under 17. In one case, a single person was controlling 34 women.)

The raids also make the chatbots more effective. “Buyers need to feel a credible risk,” said Rob Spectre, the founder and chief executive of childsafe.ai, which built the vice department’s chatbot. “If no one got arrested, no buyer would be deterred.”

The new chatbots are safer and cheaper than in-person operations, and they are always on the job. They can deter far more buyers than undercover operations can — before they buy sex. Lieutenant Sharpe said chatbots were “1,200 percent more effective than full operations.”

The New York police wait several days to send deterrence messages, so that men won’t know which phone number was the decoy. “The perception for the buyer has to be that any ad could be the ad that sends him to jail,” Mr. Spectre said.

While prostitution is still illegal almost everywhere in the United States, the police are increasingly arresting only buyers. For people engaged in prostitution, the most progressive law enforcement agencies offer social services such as shelter, job training and substance abuse treatment. Even if they haven’t been forced into it, they have still chosen a dangerous and unpleasant vocation as the best of their bad options — which means they need more options. (The New York police still make arrests for prostitution, but the numbers have dropped substantially, and most of those arrested go to special diversion courts that give people suspended sentences to receive services like counseling and drug treatment instead of jail.)

This approach is much better than treating people in prostitution as criminals. But there is a debate about whether to legalize all of it. “Criminalization makes the most marginalized even more vulnerable to exploitation,” according to R.J. Thompson, managing director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center. “We should take it out of the shadows and treat it as work.” There is trafficking in the restaurant business as well, Mr. Thompson said, but no one argues we shouldn’t eat out.

He said that current law enforcement practices to fight sex trafficking end up making life harder for prostitutes in general. Conflating prostitution and sex trafficking “results in actual policies and legislation that impact workers in very negative ways, in the guise of anti-trafficking laws,” he said.

A 2012 study of the experiences of 116 countries found that legalizing prostitution — buying as well as selling sex — does make life healthier and safer for prostitutes, and encourages buyers to prefer legal prostitutes over illegal ones, who are more likely to be trafficked. But that same study also found that legalization increased human trafficking, because the demand for commercial sex increased greatly.

The New York Police Department started using its decoy chatbot in January 2018. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office in the Chicago area uses a childsafe.ai chatbot as well. Six other cities use it intermittently, as part of a national twice-yearly campaign to go after buyers of sex.

Freedom Signal’s developer, Seattle Against Slavery, is still mostly volunteer; the tech team, for example, has one paid employee and a lot of volunteers with day jobs at Amazon or Microsoft. Freedom Signal asks partner cities to cover its costs, and many can, using federal anti-trafficking grants. But if a city can’t pay, Mr. Beiser will provide it free. He said that 13 cities are using it, including the Cook County and Los Angeles County sheriffs, and Boston’s police.

In its early days, Freedom Signal placed ads that popped up when someone typed in the usual terms of a search for sex online. Some ads warned of the harm that buying sex can cause. Others offered men help in quitting a behavior harmful to them and their families.

Then Mr. Beiser realized that online ads could make it easy to reach people in prostitution — after all, they had published their phone numbers. Freedom Signal began sending mass texts to the numbers. In the text, a trafficking survivor introduces herself and says: “I was in the life, and now I help people find housing and counseling. Are you interested in talking more?”

“It was incredibly effective — 10 times more effective than the street outreach efforts we were doing in the past,” Mr. Beiser said. It can be dangerous for a woman to have that conversation on the street. “Maybe a pimp or trafficker is watching them,” he said. “But if we send them a text, they can respond back and delete it. They can have a semi-anonymous conversation and don’t have to look anyone in the eye.”

He said that depending on the city, Freedom Signal gets responses from between 15 and 30 percent of the numbers texted. He asks cities that use its buyer deterrence chatbot to also send these texts offering services — as long as the city has services available.

The New York Police Department has sent sex buyers thousands of deterrence messages. About one out of five recipients write back, Mr. Spectre said. “They are shook,” he said. “Some are genuinely penitent: ‘I will certainly take it to heart. It’s not happening again.’ A lot of people are angry. There’s a lot of very explicit reaction. And a lot of ‘sorry, it wasn’t me’ — the number of people that appear to be loaning their phone to complete strangers is really high.”

One measure of whether the project is effective is whether buyers are caught a second time. Only about 2 percent are, Lieutenant Sharpe said, and that number has been declining over the course of the year. “That could mean they’re being more careful, or they’re outside the online marketplace, or they’re out of the game,” Mr. Spectre said. “But it is a possible indication it’s effective at reducing the buying.”

Mr. Beiser said Freedom Signal did internal tests of its effectiveness by not sending deterrence messages to some buyers. Those who got the messages were 50 to 80 percent less likely to be caught again than those who didn’t.

Many repeat buyers hang out on hobby boards — the equivalent of Yelp for commercial sex — where men discuss and rate “providers.” Lieutenant Sharpe said that his team members also hang out in these forums; one strategy is to post many “reviews” of a decoy number to drive it to the top of the list.

The deterrence messages that work best, according to Mr. Spectre, warn men of the possible consequences they can face, like arrest and significant fines. Talking about the possibility that the woman is trafficked or a minor isn’t as effective. He said that in thousands of text chats, the New York police have seen only 35 men ask the woman’s age.

Freedom Signal has one chatbot that mentions that she is 15 — and men went there anyway. Mr. Beiser said that the usual rate of completing a conversation — agreeing on a specific sex act and price — is 40 to 50 percent. The underage bot’s rate is 25 to 30 percent. Men told the fake 15-year-old “fine with me,” or “I’ll treat you right,” and sent kiss emojis.

Here’s an actual conversation:

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World,” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception ““D for Deception.”

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