India has never had an easy relationship with sex work. In a country where sex itself is treated as something between a social taboo and a moral failing, those who commodify it have always existed on the sharpest edge of society, visible enough to be exploited, invisible enough to be ignored. But something shifted over the last decade. The internet didn’t just change how sex workers operate. It changed who was vulnerable, and how.
According to a Reuters study, India has an estimated 20 million commercial sex workers, one of the largest populations in the world. About 10% of them are now reported to operate through online platforms or escort services, a share that has been rising steadily in recent years.
Across Instagram DMs, WhatsApp groups, dating apps, and coded listings on classified sites, an entire ecosystem of digital sex work has taken root. And with it has come a new, layered set of dangers, for the workers and, less discussed, for the clients too.
The Promise and the Problem
The appeal of moving online is obvious. No pimp. No brothel. No street corner. Digital platforms offer sex workers a degree of autonomy that traditional setups rarely allow, the ability to screen clients, set terms, and work from relative safety. But the protections most workers take for granted in any other digital economy simply don’t exist here.
Sex work has moved to online or virtual spaces, with workers using platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, and digital payment systems like Paytm to expand their client base, blurring the lines between offline and online spaces in ways that directly impact their working conditions and lived experiences. The problem is that platforms built for mainstream users were never designed with sex workers in mind. And the consequences of that gap are severe.
“Online escorts regularly face stalking as people have no regard for their personal lives,” says Advocate Shiv Pratap Singh, a Women and Child Rights lawyer. “They get threats and blackmail from clients online and even offline after and during in-person interactions. Sometimes people refuse to pay after taking their services, as there is no solid system for them to approach regarding this issue.”
That last point matters more than it might seem. Without institutional recourse, unpaid clients become unpunished harassers. There is no HR department, no contract enforcement, no union. When a client refuses to pay, a sex worker’s only real options are to absorb the loss or escalate, which, for someone already operating in legal grey areas, is rarely worth the risk.
Then there’s the platform problem. “Their accounts on Instagram, WhatsApp, or dating apps are often suspended,” Singh notes, “which forces them into unsafe and unregulated offline work.” In trying to protect themselves from reputational risk, tech companies push sex workers off visible platforms and into darker corners of the web, or back onto the streets where the dangers multiply.
The Numbers behind the fear
India’s cybercrime landscape tells a stark story. The NCRB’s 2024 Crime in India report recorded 101,928 cybercrime cases, an increase of over 17.9% from the previous year. Of these, total cybercrime cases against women stood at 14,409, which accounted for nearly 65% of all reported cybercrime cases. Over 64% of these cases were motivated by cyber harassment, morphing, and blackmail, while publishing sexually explicit material made up roughly another 15% of the offenses.
But those numbers almost certainly undercount the reality. A 2023 Internet Freedom Foundation study found that nearly 68% of respondents who faced digital fraud or harassment did not report it, either because they didn’t believe police would take action, or because they feared being shamed online. For sex workers, that reluctance is exponentially higher. The stigma of their profession makes formal complaints not just emotionally difficult but potentially dangerous, an interaction with law enforcement could expose their work, their identity, and their clients.
Neeha Nagpal, Founding and Managing Partner at N & Company Legal, has seen this firsthand. “Privacy is a concern assuming someone is filming them or taking pictures, or sharing any information about them online,” she explains. “We’ve had a case a few years ago where a young girl logged onto an online erotica platform and before she knew it her pictures and videos went viral across different platforms. We had to file complaints under the IT Act as well as file a Writ in Delhi High Court.”
That case is not an outlier. Incidents where non-consensual sexually explicit material of women was published or transmitted amounted to 2,251 cases in 2022, up from 1,896 in 2021, representing an 11% rise in a country already known for the underreporting of violence against women.
What the law actually says
Here’s where things get complicated. India does not outright criminalize sex work, but it doesn’t exactly protect it either.
Singh points to the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 (ITPA), which does not criminalize voluntary sex work but bans brothels and public solicitation. More significantly, the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Prajwala v. Union of India affirmed sex work as a profession deserving dignity. “It specifically directed police not to harass voluntary sex workers while clarifying the distinction between voluntary sex work and trafficking,” Singh explains. “Additionally, as per this judgment, rehabilitation must be voluntary, not forced.”
That ruling was significant. But the gap between what courts have said and what police actually do remains enormous, especially when the interaction happens entirely online, where jurisdiction is murky and accountability even murkier.
Nagpal takes a more pragmatic view of the legal toolkit. “Article 21 of the Constitution safeguards privacy rights,” she says. “The IT Act, the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, the DPDP Act, and the BNSS, all these acts protect online sex workers.” The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act of 2023, in particular, is worth noting. It offers mechanisms to hold platforms accountable for misusing personal data, something with direct implications for sex workers whose content is shared or sold without consent.
“The best course,” Nagpal advises, “would be taking immediate legal action, getting a Takedown or Cease and Desist notice sent to hosting platforms including Google and Meta. Additionally, petitioning courts to get John Doe injunctions to protect one’s personality rights, especially since privacy is now recognised as a fundamental right.”
The client side nobody talks about
The discourse around sex work safety almost always centers on the worker. But clients carry their own significant exposure, and the intersection of that vulnerability with India’s booming sextortion industry creates a specific kind of danger.
According to data presented by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), 24% of cybercrime complaints in 2023 were related to sextortion scams, where victims were told to pay up after being recorded in compromising situations during video calls from unknown numbers. These criminal networks often operate call-center style operations, contacting victims through social media or messaging platforms before shifting to video calls and extortion. Some gangs reportedly maintain dozens or hundreds of fake accounts simultaneously, allowing them to continue operating even after individual profiles are blocked.
“This is probably the biggest risk in India today,” Nagpal says plainly. She outlines the common pattern: a user connects with someone online, a video call turns sexual, the call is secretly recorded, and threats are made to send recordings to family, employers, or contacts unless money is paid. “Even where no crime has occurred,” she adds, “leaked conversations or manipulated media can create professional and personal consequences.”
India now has more than 958 million internet users, more than any country except China, and that number is expected to grow significantly in the years ahead. Cybercrime officials say the cases of such fraud spiked during COVID-19 lockdowns, as more people found themselves online for longer periods than ever before.
Practical safeguards in a broken system
Given the legal ambiguity and institutional failure, both lawyers lean toward practical, preventive measures.
For sex workers, Nagpal recommends a clear operational separation from personal life: use pseudonyms, maintain separate phones, emails, and bank accounts, use encrypted communications, remove location metadata from photos and videos, and watermark content to deter unauthorized redistribution. “In case of any untoward incident,” she adds, “immediately file a complaint with the National Cyber Crime Portal or with the local cyber cell under the Information and Technology Act.”
Singh emphasizes awareness as the foundation. “Teaching online escorts about privacy, encryption, and scam detection will help them keep themselves safe from online predators,” he says. “They can also get in touch with local NGOs who can help them understand their rights and assist them in navigating through the legal system if there is ever a need. Some of these NGOs even have counseling and peer support networks.”
For clients, Nagpal’s advice is blunter: never engage in intimate video calls with unknown persons, assume every video call can be recorded, avoid sharing identity documents, and report any sextortion immediately, both to the platform and through a formal complaint under the IT Act.
The bigger picture
The conviction rate for cybercrime cases in India remains notoriously low, averaging between 3% to 3.5%. When isolating gender-specific crimes like cyberbullying, sextortion, and online harassment against women, final court convictions are even lower, trailing far behind the rates for traditional crimes against women.
That number says more about the system than any legal framework could. Laws exist. Judgments have been passed. Rights have been affirmed. But enforcement is inconsistent, stigma is pervasive, and the communities most at risk remain the least equipped to navigate the machinery of justice.
Online sex workers in India occupy a particularly precarious position, neither protected by the regulated labor market nor shielded by the kind of community solidarity that traditional red-light districts sometimes offer. They are, in many ways, the clearest illustration of what happens when a population moves into digital spaces that were never designed to accommodate them.
The screen promised safety. For too many, it delivered a different kind of exposure instead.