In July 2017, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office conducted an effort to deter sex buyers that was based on the web-based reverse sting model, but rather than pursuing the objective of arresting sex buyers, resulted in a brief effort to verbally deter them from future attempts to buy sex locally. Detectives began by posting two online ads for sex, and responding calls started immediately and the phone rang continuously for hours in their office in Stroudsburg. The male callers, responding to online ads on backpage.com, were routed to one of three detectives with the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office running the unique operation called “Jamming for Johns.”  Unlike the typical reverse sting, this one operated as a public awareness campaign. About 120 men called over eight hours, and received a warning that paying for sex is a crime that also fuels sex trafficking and the opioid crisis. The people delivering the message were Monroe County detectives who identified themselves as such.  They then told the prospective buyers that if they had shown up to buy sex, they would have been arrested, charged with a crime, and had their name and picture published locally in various media outlets.The officers kept a log of every caller’s number, in case they arise in future investigations or stings.  Another detective reached out to women who had ads on backpage.com, posing as an interested customer and would then pass the phone to the executive director of Truth for Women, a nonprofit group that helps victims of sex trafficking. If the woman didn’t hang up, they were offered help through the therapeutic home for sex trafficking survivors, and provided the phone number to the national sex trafficking hotline, 1-888-373-7888.

In the third annual “Report on Commercial Sexual Exploitation in Pennsylvania” (2018) by Villanova University’s Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation (CSE Institute), Monroe was one of 10 Pennsylvania counties in which the number of individuals charged with violations of the state’s sex buying statute (§ 5902(e)) outnumbered the charged with violations of § 5902(a) for providing commercial sex since the state criminal code created separate offenses for buying and selling sex in 2014. The 10 counties were : Adams, Beaver, Bradford, Centre, Franklin, Lebanon, McKean, Mercer, Monroe, and Northampton.

In March, 2019, a man was arrested in Stroudsburg as the result of an undercover sex sting in which he arranged to pay to have sex with an 11-year-old girl. The 40 year old man was charged by the Monroe County district attorney’s office with attempted rape of a child, and a total of 13 felony charges.  A prostituted woman who was arrested earlier in the month told detectives a man contacted her saying he was interested in paying her to find him a young girl to have sex with. Investigators found evidence of the conversation in the woman’s cell phone and were able to identify the man. Two detectives from the district attorney’s office continued the conversation, posing as the prostitute, and told the suspect they had found a woman who was willing to allow him to have sex with her daughter for $400. The detectives began posing as the child’s mother while talking with the man, who asked the detectives if they could also arrange it so he would pay the mother $100 every week to have the 11-year-old child perform a sexual act on him. The detectives arranged to meet in Stroudsburg, and the man was apprehended by investigators after he arrived at the meeting.