AUDASE

3 Men Are in Custody in a String of Rapes and Robberies

By TATIANA SCHLOSSBERG NY TIMES

All three women had placed ads online looking to exch

ange sex for money, and had arranged to meet with an interested party this summer. Each reported afterward that she had been raped and robbed by three men.

One suspect, Fernando Sandel, 26, was arrested on Friday, officials said. He was arraigned Sunday night on five counts of rape and multiple counts of burglary, robbery and other crimes. His bail was set at $200,000, and he will next appear in court on Aug. 24.

Two other men — Isaiah Rivera, 31, and Joey Cruz, 26 — were detained Sunday night, the police said.

The women all had advertisements on Backpage.com, a website for classified ads with extensive listings for adult entertainment. The terms of the site explicitly prohibit soliciting sexual acts in exchange for money, but the site still contains listings to that effect.

In all three of the assaults, the women were made physically vulnerable — sprayed in the face with Mace or another debilitating substance, or placed in a precarious position — before being raped and subsequently robbed of cash or other valuables.

On June 28, a 20-year-old woman from Maryland made arrangements to meet with a man in the South Bronx who had responded to her advertisement. Three men arrived and forced the woman to the roof of the building, where they raped her and took her money, according to the police.

In the second assault, on Aug. 3, another woman, 34, had plans to meet with a man at the Grand Hyatt hotel on East 42nd Street. When he arrived, he sprayed the woman in the face with an unknown substance and threw her onto the bed, officials said. Two other men then arrived in the room, and they tied her up and raped her before stealing her pocketbook and cellphone.

A similar encounter occurred the next day, on Aug. 4: A woman, 32, planned to have a man who responded to her ad come to her apartment near Gramercy Park. When he got there, he sprayed her with Mace. Then two other men arrived, and all three tied the woman up before raping her and stealing her laptop, cellphone and bracelet.

Reported rapes have risen citywide over the last year, to 812 by Aug. 2 — not including the last two complaints in this series of assaults — compared with 767 by the same point in 2014.

The majority of rapes and sexual assaults involve a suspect and a victim who know each other, but assaults by strangers carried out during meetings arranged on the Internet have caused alarm about the safety of online dating in the past.

New York State law requires that online dating sites post safety notices offering users advice on how to protect themselves, and sites including Match.com say in their terms of agreement that they do not conduct background checks, criminal or otherwise, on people who register for the site.

Backpage.com also includes safety tips, but the site has previously been sued by women under the age of 18 who said they were sold for sex on the site. The site’s terms of agreement say that users agree to report any illegal services or activity, and also to “report suspected exploitation of minors and/or human trafficking to the appropriate authorities.” The site was owned by Village Voice Media until 2012, when the company, facing increasing scrutiny over the allegations in the women’s lawsuits, split from the site and created a new media company for its alternative weekly newspapers and websites.

Representatives for Backpage.com could not be reached on Sunday, but lawyers have previously said that the website scans for 25,000 terms and codes associated with prostitution, child exploitation and sex trafficking to prevent the ads from making it to the site.

Referring to online dating or prostitution, a spokesman for the Police Department said, “You run the risk of meeting anybody when you engage in that kind of activity.”