Lynn is a town within Washington Township in Randolph County, Indiana. It is located in eastern Indiana, near the Ohio border, between Muncie, IN and Dayton, OH. The town’s population is under 1,000 residents. Prostitution and sex trafficking have been documented within the county for years, generating complaints and tips to police.

Local efforts to address these problems have included the arrest of sex buyers and public disclosure of their identities. For example, in August 2018, a gas station clerk in Randolph County was accused of offering a female customer money to have sex with him on multiple occasions. According to a report filed by a Lynn Police Department officer, a woman contacted him to say that she went into the gas station and the clerk offered her $500 to have sex with him and that “no one would have to know about it.” The woman told the officer the clerk then violently pulled her up to the counter and asked her numerous personal questions including whether she had been with an older man and if she had ever been paid for sex. The woman said after several minutes of uncomfortable questioning she was able to leave the gas station. According to the police report, the officer had that same woman return to the gas station on several other occasions while wearing a camera and each time the man offered a different amount of money for sex and invited her to his home. On the last meeting, the woman met the clerk outside the store away from the surveillance cameras and he offered her $35 for “mouth only” and $50 for two hours with her. The suspect was arrested shortly after that last meeting and was charged with public indecency, promoting prostitution, and patronizing prostitution. The man’s identity was included in news reports. The case is counted for Demand Forum purposes as a reverse sting operation since it involved an undercover operation intended to produce evidence allowing for the apprehension and prosecution of a sex buyer, but it was not a conventional reverse sting. It was not a proactive effort to capture multiple offenders responding to a police decoy; instead, it was a narrowly targeted effort to capture one sex buyer, using an actual victim.