OK, for this to make sense, you need to know that a) prostitution is legal in the UK and b) the demand from women for straight male escorts (SMEs) is very, very tiny and the supply of men who want to be SME's is huge.

How tiny? The market for male escorts is substantially smaller than the one for female ones, and of the men using the main sexual health service for male escorts in London over the past few years, 98.5% had only male clients vs only about 0.5% with only female clients. (I recently had to explain to someone who really should have known better that the reason those don't add up to 100% is that some had both. Still many more male than female ones, though.)

How huge? Well, one single escort ad site currently has over six thousand optimistic men wanting to be SMEs.

This discrepancy between supply and demand means that scams thrive on selling the SME dream. Dozens and dozens of sites will promise you that there is a huge demand for SMEs, so much so that.. they have to charge the wannabe SMEs money up front rather than do what every single genuine escort agency does and only charge a commission on the work they find the escort.

They dress the charges up in a variety of ways, but there is an absolutely basic test: if an 'agency' wants to charge you money up front, it's a scam.

Sadly – particularly so when I know the twunt in question – lots of men are too busy chasing the dream to think before handing over the money.

How busy? One not particularly good scam site must have made about £20k in a year, and there is a bunch based in Spain who a lot of people would like to 'talk' to that have made much, much more from charging hundreds of pounds to advertise to yourself. (Really! No-one else can see the ad paid for.) In some cases, which really do make me wonder about their mental state, victims have been caught by the same scammers using different names several times. I think the record is five – with this lot, that translates as losing upwards of £2k.

(They take women's money too, typically by talking of 'non-sexual escorting'. Same issue applies: almost no demand but a large supply of victims who think there are thousands of men begging to pay women hundreds of pounds just to take them out to dinner. Yeah, right.)

So where are the genuine SME agencies? Well, anyone even vaguely sensible knows that if you're going to risk being charged with controlling prostitution for gain (what agencies do or no-one would call them – legally, 'control' has no implications of coercion, exploitation, deception, force, trafficking or anything else moralistic abolitionists like Bindel keep going on about) you do not pick a market with very low demand. You have an agency with female staff or, probably only if you're gay or trans yourself and you're determined to cut your earnings, you look at the 'gay' male market or that for pre-op transsexuals.

You do not go for a SME agency. It hasn't stopped the odd person trying, but they have a very short life expectancy and there are currently no known ones. I suspect they spent far more time going 'no, we don't need any more male escorts, thanks' than talking to female potential clients. One big problem is that as the scamers' income is far higher than yours (a quarter to a third of almost nothing is not much) they can easily outspend you on ads. Some of them have also been quite clueless with their ad budget – you could only find the last known one on Google if you already knew its name.

So imagine my surprise when a routine check to see who's ripped off text I've written came up with maleescortforum.com – they copied wholesale my comments about one scam in particular and passed it off as their work – and I saw that they are going to set up an SME agency.

And on a site with a queue of wannabe SMEs moaning about being scammed, they are going to charge £50 to the lucky few who pass the tests. Typically a scam's only test is 'do you have the money?' but this lot are going to be really picky, apparently, which just makes it even sillier.

Assuming, that is, that the money really is going to pay for a CRB check. For a variety of reasons, no other escort agency wants CRB checks, including the fact that 'escort' is not a job covered by the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (ROA) 1974 Exceptions Order 1975 and so the CRB would say 'sod off, nosey' if you asked.

But they're determined. Unlike the conversations with the thousand or so mostly clueless people who rang me at ex-work wanting to ask about how to run a "high class" agency (all but about two of them stressed that!) this one's online…

Update: oooh, they've cracked.

Update2: argh, they've deleted the discussion, and it is as if they always planned to be sensible (well, as sensible as anyone planning to do a SME agency can be).