Isn't this business hard enough already?

Providing personal services is one of the most dangerous professions on the planet. Violence, arrest, disease and robbery are among the various risks a working girl or boy has to deal with on a regular basis.

You would think that this would mean that people in the industry would always stick together and support each other. Unfortunately, this doesn't always seem to be the case. Over many, many months we have been in the situation of trying to deal with a vendetta between several individuals who advertise on Massage Republic.

Some of the accusations flying around include the following:

• She reported me to the police as a drug smuggler so I got arrested at the airport
• She is posting fake reviews on your site and others
• She posted my real name and a profile on another site
• She is posting about me all over the Internet and bitching about me everywhere 
• Look what she did to this other girl ...

There is one girl who is so angry with another that she is actively trying to find out where she is so she can report her to the police (in a country where that can have really nasty consequences). We got this, "I know where she is staying the room the lot, I think she is going to be kicked out the country that is if she does not get off your site - simple really" Pretty evil, but who knows? Maybe it's justified revenge? We don't know and we don't want to know. We think all of this kind of behaviour is really, really dumb. No-one will earn any more money and it makes the world a more dangerous place for all people working in the industry.

We are also on the receiving end of some very rude emails with loads of abuse in them. We prefer to use our time to help the people who are very happy with what we are doing and play by our rules, which are:

• Advertisers are not permitted to use the platform to contact other advertisers, post questions/review to others. We will block accounts and refuse future new accounts.
• Advertisers are not permitted to link from a profile to a webpage talking about other advertisers in any way.
• We will not enter into discussion with any advertiser about the rights of any other advertiser to list on the site. We will only consider submissions which report activity which is not permitted on site.

Yes, this might mean that a person who has done something nasty to someone else in the past is allowed to list on the site. However, we are not going to play judge and jury to evaluate an individual's behaviour. Aside from this being completely impossible to do well - it is not our place to do so. If you don't like our rules, it's simple - don't use the site.

To end with some advice: in our experience, you should avoid talking about other girls with clients and never try and get into a fight. Be nice with others, play fair and if you get screwed over - move on. Otherwise, the results seem to be a zero-sum game where everyone involved really gets damaged and put at risk. And, no-one wants that, right?

Getting there...

We've been reviewing all the feedback from you all from the last months. Thank you so much for all of the comments and suggestions.

We know we still have a lot more to do, but just to know that so many people are getting results is a real boost to the team!

When we hear 'independents' tell us we are generating them enough new customers so they don't have to look elsewhere, it's a great result. When we get feedback from users that we have helped them find better providers, we know we are making a small difference. When we hear agencies telling us that they prefer Massage Republic to others, that makes a big difference.

So, thanks to all of you all. We started this a year and a half ago. We didn't expect to get where we are by now. We will carry on working hard to build on the trust you have given to us and bring new improvements to the site.

We are listening! Get in touch if you have comments or suggestions.

Staying safe online

If you regularly reuse the same password in different places, you could be at real risk!

Over the last weeks, we have some pretty nasty people messing up profiles on the site. After working to trace what was happening and talking to the people who were affected, we are pretty sure we know how it is happening.

We have positively identified that the bad guys have access to passwords which have been used to set up accounts on other escort sites (your data at Massage Republic is safe, we encrypt all passwords so we can't even see what you entered and no-one else can either). 

They are then trying these same email/password combinations on Massage Republic until they find ones which are the same. They then steal the profile and change it with their own information, new phone number (mostly in the Philippines) and in several cases pointing the website link to expatescort.com. We don't know whether this activity is coming from that site directly, they have been hacked or it is someone else just causing trouble and looking for phone bookings. We would strongly urge you to be cautious with some of the sites out there! 

Massage Republic recommends:

• Don't reuse the same password online for different services
• If you have done this in the past, go change your Massage Republic password now and think about any other places you want to keep safe as they may be at risk

If you have any doubts about security or questions please get in touch.

Tribute to Summertime

It's hot, people are away. Those in hot places run from air conditioner to another. Time to reflect. Time to think.



It's a perfect time to send a tribute to a beautiful woman, and an immense singer. She lived life on the edge, then fell off at the untimely age of 27. Loved by many, she destroyed herself.

If you ever lost a friend in this very hard industry, take a couple of minutes to listen to Janis Joplin sing with Jimi Hendrix playing guitar. We will always remember those we have lost, especially those who never got famous.

How depressing! Must be the heat!

Getting back to work. In July, we increased the number of enquiries for our much-loved members by 30%. Shocked? We were. Working to keep it up (not literally) and make sure August and September work out even better.

One million visits

We just passed one million visits to the website. We don't really know how many individual people that means have visited, probably half of that. If we get conservative, it's might be a third of that - 330,000...

That's: 770 Fully loaded Jumbo Jets, or 110,000 threesomes, or more than the population of Iceland!

Thanks for all the compliments many of you have sent, also for the massive amount of suggestions and complaints about stuff not working. We have done a lot of work to make things as smooth as possible for users and advertisers and most of that came from you. We really do appreciate it.

We will hit one million contact actions (messages, clicks on phone number and clicks to website) for our advertisers in the next couple of months, so we do know we have generated a lot of usefulness to both advertisers and users. We are looking forward to the next steps where we will bring more functionality and value to everyone.

March madness

Massage Republic just had its first anniversary - the service has been online for a year! Some stats:

• Since we launched we have achieved over 500,000 contact actions for our advertisers
• Over 70,000 people will visit the site this month

All of us here would like to say thanks to both our users and advertisers - for hopefully getting some satisfaction from the service and for all of the great feedback and comments you have made over the last months. We worked hard to make a good place for all of you to find each other online. We are really happy we have been able to help lots of working girls and boys make a better living! 

If you have any comments or suggestions, please get in touch! Here's a quick update on some of the things we've done over the last weeks:

For users

We upgraded your account page so you can see what matters to you in one place: your favourites, reviews and questions.

For advertisers

• Limits on free accounts: As the number of users has increased, we have had to introduce a limit on the number of enquiries a free listing can get. If you reach the limit in a 30 day period you will get an email and your profile will not be visible in search results for a couple of weeks - it will always remain available on the site and people will still be able to contact you. We have done this to make it fairer for all of our free members as this will distribute the enquires more fairly. If you upgrade the limits don't apply and we have introduced a 'low cost' basic package and lowered prices on the other subscriptions.
• We improved the account page to make it easier to get to information on how your profile is performing and make improvements to it.
• Upgrading payments: Many of you got in touch over the last months to tell us about payment problems. Our payment provider has been declining an increasing number of transactions; for reasons like using a card in one one country from another or trying to pay from a high risk country (which for them seems to be an ever growing list with most of the Middle East on it, Malta, Cyprus, most of Africa, etc). We have just plugged in an alternate provider which has a wide range of funding options including: bank transfer, Western Union and credit cards (registration required unless paying with Bitcoins). We hope it works for you and let us know if there are any problems.

Thanks again and a big kiss to all of you, Claire

What we did in Feb

Been a busy couple of months. We have been working hard trying to make sure that Massage Republic works for as many people as possible. This has meant a lot of small changes fixing things that didn't work in different browsers and trying to make using the site easier.

For advertisers

We have completely upgraded the part of the site where advertisers manage their listings. We have also added in a page where you can see all of the statistics for the number of people who have seen and interacted with your profile.

You can now use the photo verification service for free (this is a limited trial at the moment, so take advantage of the opportunity if you have not verified your photos yet!)

We have heard many people are having problems with payments, so are working on providing some alternatives in the very new future.

For users

We have improved the way questions and reviews work based on your comments. We hope that more of you will get involved and share your experiences on the site.

For everyone!

Thanks for all of the feedback and support. We appreciate this a lot and will carry on working hard to make the site a useful place for all of you.