Sex Worker Evidence: Rights, Privacy, and Legal Risks Explained

When police target sex workers, they don’t just arrest—they sex worker evidence, digital and physical data used to prosecute or harass individuals engaged in sex work. Also known as criminalization data, it includes texts, bank records, location history, and even photos—often taken without consent or a warrant. This isn’t about public safety. It’s about control. And it’s happening right now, in cities across the UK and beyond.

Behind every arrest is a trail of digital evidence, information pulled from phones, apps, and payment platforms that can be used to build a case against a sex worker. This includes metadata from messaging apps, timestamps of client meetings, and transaction histories from Venmo, PayPal, or crypto wallets. Even if you never broke a law, this data can be twisted to imply guilt. Police don’t need a warrant to seize your phone in many cases, and once it’s in their hands, they can extract years of private life—messages with friends, family photos, medical appointments—all of it. Then there’s loitering laws, vague ordinances that let officers target people simply for standing in certain areas, often near known client pickup spots. These aren’t about preventing crime—they’re about pushing sex workers out of neighborhoods, making them more vulnerable to violence and less likely to report it. And if you’re a migrant, a person of color, or transgender? The odds of being targeted go up fast.

What’s worse? Financial systems are weaponized too. Banks freeze accounts. Payment processors shut down services. No warning. No appeal. Your income disappears because someone flagged your business as "high risk." That’s not fraud prevention—that’s financial exclusion, the systematic denial of banking and payment access to sex workers, regardless of legality or safety practices. economic censorship is real, and it’s tied directly to how sex worker evidence is used to justify discrimination.

You’re not alone in this. Thousands of sex workers have fought back—with apps that encrypt messages, legal aid groups that challenge unlawful searches, and networks that share safety cards in 18 languages. But knowledge is power. The more you understand how evidence is gathered, how laws are abused, and how your digital footprint can be turned against you, the better you can protect yourself.

Below, you’ll find real guides on what happens when police seize your phone, how to spot when loitering laws are being misused, how to keep your money safe, and what rights you actually have—even when the system tries to erase them. This isn’t theory. It’s survival. And it’s all written by people who’ve been through it.