Indiana Police Misplace More Than $30,000 Seized in Massage Parlor Raids

More than $30,000 in cash seized from two Indiana massage parlors is missing.

Police seized the money in November 2023 as part of a joint state and local raid on two northern Indiana massage parlors—Jade Massage in Winfield and Relax Spa in Crown Point—and associated businesses and houses. Authorities began investigating the spas after allegedly receiving anonymous tips that prostitution took place there.

Four penis massages for an undercover detective later, authorities raided the businesses and seized more than $97,000 in cash, along with a car. Spa owners Guan Yu and Wujiao Liu, a married couple, were arrested. Their case is ongoing—and their cash is missing.

State police are now investigating what happened. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation for the missing cash; this could well come down to carelessness, not corruption. Regardless, this case represents yet another instance of police profiting off sex work criminalization.

The Search for the Missing Cash

Robert Byrd, who was sworn in as Winfield’s town marshal in April 2025, “assumed that the money had been placed in a secure account established through the Winfield Clerk-treasurer’s Office or a local bank,” reports the Post-Tribune.

It wasn’t.

Eventually, Byrd tracked some of the seized cash down to a rented storage locker, where bills and coins were stashed in plastic bins.

But Byrd could locate only $63,473.86 of the $97,014.37 that was taken. $33,540.51 was missing.

Lake County prosecutor Bernard A. Carter has now asked Indiana state police “to thoroughly investigate this matter and to make every effort to recover the missing funds.” The state police agreed.

The fact that it took some sleuthing for Byrd to discover where the money was stored is itself incredible. Evidence is supposed to be well-tracked and well-documented. And cash seized during an investigation could eventually need to be returned (remember, no one has yet been convicted in this case).

And if this turns out to be more than just sloppy police work? That wouldn’t exactly be surprising, given the perverse incentives and ample opportunities for corruption that massage parlor prostitution cases present.

The Massage Parlor Raid Racket  

Anonymous tips about sexual services being offered along with massages can be used to justify months of undercover visits from law enforcement agents seeking massages. (Later, they will say the masseuses could be trafficking victims—which, if true, would make their months of visits without intervention especially cruel.) And any offer of sex acts with massages can be used to justify raids.

Asian massage parlors tend to be cash-heavy businesses, so there’s often plenty of cash around to seize—and, unlike when you seize money from bank accounts, no definitive record trail. The workers and owners at these businesses are often immigrants, for whom language barriers and other considerations could make it harder to fight back. And if police throw a “human trafficking” allegation in there, no mater how unsubstantiated, everyone just shrugs at whatever happens to those arrested and pats police on the back for a job well done.

Missing money aside, the Winfield case is a fine indictment of how so many massage parlor raid cases operate.

The Search for Penis Masseuses

Months before the spa raid, Detective Benjamin Moyars, co-chair of the Indiana Protection for Abused and Trafficked Humans Law Enforcement Task Force, went to Jade Massage and got his butt and penis massaged using police funds, according to a probable cause affidavit. (“He did not ejaculate,” it says.) That was on March 3, 2023.

In April, he went back and got a penis massage from two women this time. One of them “appeared to not speak English,” the affidavit says.

In June, Moyars went back twice—once to Jade Massage and once to Relax Massage. Same thing.

Over the course of the four months, Moyars spent $385—and who knows how much in police time and expenses—on proving that three women would massage his genitals along with the rest of his body.

After that, authorities spent several more months surveilling the businesses. Nothing in the probable cause affidavit indicates that they observed signs of forced prostitution, a.k.a. sex trafficking, during this surveillance.

Nonetheless, police raided the businesses and Liu and Yu were charged with not just promoting prostitution but also promotion of human sexual trafficking, in addition to being charged for failing to remit sales tax. Liu was also charged with battery against a public safety official after allegedly spitting at an officer during the course of her arrest.

According to the probable cause affidavit, a sign glimpsed in Relax Massage during the raid stated: “Therapist should stick to the work principle. Don’t practice the therapy as porn or you will have the consequence.”

But—in a fine example of how police often twist language in order to turn ordinary prostitution cases into sex trafficking cases—the affidavit states that “Detective Moyars advised in his experience with human trafficking and prostitution investigations, owners pay the female employees so little that they are effectively forced to perform sexual services in the hopes of cash tips to support themselves.” Voila: Even if the owners did not condone the sex acts, let alone make anyone perform them, they are deemed guilty of “forcing” people into prostitution.

Interviews with four “victims”—two of them the same women who allegedly massaged Moyar’s penis—suggest that these women came to work at Jade and Relax spas voluntarily, were not confined there by the owners, were not subject to violence or threats, and were paid for their work.

In the News

If Mayday Health and the abortion lobby want to sue us for defending unborn life, bring it on. pic.twitter.com/MTqiDuItGj

— Larry Rhoden (@LarryRhodenSD) May 29, 2026

Abortion advertising ban is unconstitutional, says Mayday Health. A New York–based nonprofit that provides information about accessing abortion pills is suing South Dakota over its ban on abortion-related advertising. Mayday Health “and a Democratic former South Dakota lawmaker, Nancy Turbak Berry, filed the lawsuit Friday in federal court against South Dakota’s Republican governor and attorney general,” South Dakota Searchlight reports:

The new law says no person may knowingly dispense, distribute, sell or advertise an article or thing designed, adapted or intended to produce an abortion. The ban also covers any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing that is “advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing an abortion.”

Violations are felonies punishable by up to two years in prison and a $4,000 fine. The law also gives the state attorney general authority to recover civil penalties of $10,000 per violation.

The lawsuit alleges it’s unconstitutional to prohibit advertising that’s protected by the free speech guarantees in the First Amendment.

Mayday was involved in a previous legal tussle with South Dakota (which this newsletter covered in January), after South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley went after Mayday over ads that it had taken out at gas stations.

The ads said: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Learn more at Mayday.Health.”

Jackley said this constituted deceptive advertising because the ads didn’t point out that abortion is illegal in South Dakota.

Mayday counter-sued Jackley, seeking to prevent him “from punishing Plaintiff Mayday Health for publishing truthful information about reproductive healthcare.”

South Dakota and Mayday ultimately settled those cases. The agreement involved Mayday yanking the gas station ads.

On Substack

Eminent domain for data centers? Bonnie Kristian reports on Georgia officials using eminent domain power to seize 20 to 30 homes so a private company called Georgia Power can build new power lines. A woman named Ansley Brown has been speaking out about this on TikTok, blaming artificial intelligence. The power lines are not set to serve only data centers, but “a local news story confirms that at least one data center is involved here, and it’s plausible that the data center(s) is the straw that broke the camel’s back, even if there’s a lot more straw,” Kristian writes.

“Now, there’s a sense in which the artificial intelligence piece of this story is a distraction,” she continues:

My point is not that it’s bad for Brown’s mom to lose her house because AI is bad and therefore there should be no data centers.

I’m very skeptical of many proposed uses for AI, but as I’ve argued here before, its utility costs are wholly relative to the value of its output. If AI is doing a lot of good, then probably we do want to use a lot of electricity for it, which may well mean building new data centers and power lines. And as skeptical as I am, I think the good it does is not zero, so I’m not categorically against this kind of construction.

The issue is that Georgia Power is a private company that appears to be using eminent domain to take people’s homes against their will to meet other private companies’ expansion plans.

As Kristian points out, it’s not entirely clear whether the new power lines would be needed even if a new data center wasn’t being constructed. But regardless of what sort of construction is primarily driving the Georgia Power situation, eminent domain issues may become a bigger issue as construction of data centers expands. It seems important for people who are not hyperbolic AI-doomers to be speaking out against this.

Read This Thread

Hard to express just how utterly divorced the political rhetoric around porn is from the reality. I’ve worked in the industry for more than 20 years. I see porn all day long. I have never once seen necrophilia or bestiality on an adult site.But that’s what’s being used to push antiporn laws.

— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile.bsky.social) 2026-05-28T16:10:49.858Z

More Sex & Tech

• The Department of Homeland Security is ramping up spending on iris scanners.

• “Texas for now can require proof of age to download a smart phone app, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday, unpausing a trial court injunction that halted the law on First Amendment grounds,” Bloomberg Law reports.

• Lizzie Borden, director of the 1986 drama Working Girls, talks about the ways sex work has changed over the past 40 years and the ways it hasn’t. “There’s a lot of argument about whether prostitution be legalised or be the Scandinavian model,” said Borden. “Decriminalisation would be best because that’s the only way nobody gets punished, so sex workers still have customers.”

• “A federal judge had an extramarital affair with a high-ranking police officer—including having sex in the judge’s chambers that was overheard by staff—and initially lied about the actions but remains on the bench after receiving a ‘private reprimand,'” the Associated Press reports.