Well finally, and after a lot of hard work by a lot of people our Nationwide Ugly Mugs Pilot Scheme launches tomorrow!

I'll post more after the event if there's anything to add, but we've had a positive article in the Guardian today here and the official launch is tomorrow in Manchester - shortly after this there will be a link on the UK Network of Sex Work Projects site here to the new Nationwide Ugly Mugs website which is free to join, and can be used for anonymous reporting by any sex worker irrespective of gender, immigration or tax status, way of working or anything else.

If anybody wants more information in the meantime, you can also contact uglymugs@uknswp.org.uk. Please support the scheme - if we make a difference in a year, we get to keep it .

Congratulations 

Thank you!

I'll write a proper Sticky for the Warnings section when I've got a bit more time, but the launch yesterday was great and it was actually a bit strange to sit in (and speak to, Gawd love 'em - they were very kind ) a room full of people who ALL want to stop people from targeting, attacking and hurting us and are all setting time aside and working really hard to really do something about it.

We had other speakers from Manchester City Council, the Greater London Assembly, senior police people including the head of SCAS and the Missing Persons Bureau (the Serious Crimes Analysis Section who will be analysing the information which gets reported and can then start piecing it together to spot patterns of incidents and so on, even with people who move around the country) as well as academics, Lorraine, Rosie and Shelly from UKNSWP (who some here will have been in touch with before) and Baroness Stern, who has been on our side for years although I didn't get chance to speak to her.

The scheme is now live at http://www.uknswp.org/ugly-mugs/ and anybody can join - if anybody has a warning they want to report (even ones that are already on here, and do keep posting them here too), please do sign up and support the scheme - the more of us do, the more alerts we'll get and the easier it will be to avoid not just the chancers and the scumbags (see Croydon warning, Englishgent, Jerome_669, Mr Ward and the rest of the motley assortment) but also the very dangerous. Gary Allen here is still at large in Grimsby as well as this man in Sefton, Liverpool who is known to have contacted ladies who use this site.

Christopher Shepherd was caught, convicted and jailed partly on information given by people who use this site. Ditto Neil McMillan, who murdered Andrea Waddell in Brighton, and was later found to have raped another sex worker at an earlier date.

We can all make a difference, for ourselves and each other by supporting National Ugly Mugs, so I hope everybody who needs it will put it to good use .

This feels like a massive step forwards in the right direction x

Some more encouraging press for NUM in the Huffington Post .

Woohoo!

I now have banners which I can email to anybody who wants one for their site; just PM me with an email address and I'll send 'em out .

Sending PM now.

Just joined, brill scheme xx

It mostly works the other way around, put numbers of potential clients into their database.

I'm currently annoyed by the way it logs you in, then tells you to log in again - you have to click again on the menu, then scroll down. Makes it a right hassle.

Personally I want to make my own judgement based on story and full number, but they say that isn't possible due to privacy/legal reasons.

It works the same way that other Ugly Mugs schemes do, the Ireland one being a fairly well known one. It's not legal to supply people with identifying personal details which would include a phone number (and is also the reason we can't publish them here), so nobody can legally post up pages of phone numbers for random interested parties to leaf through.

What you can do in the event that you think you have the number of somebody dodgy is type it in and see if there's a hit. You still won't be given a full number, just told what the report is that it's linked to - you have to have the number in the first place .