Simon Suraci

So weird. Yes, this was today. I thought by posting I would see if this is a fluke or an ongoing problem. Sounds like I’m not alone. I could never stay in business operating this way. More power to him if he can. I think others should know what they’re getting into, that he can’t be relied upon to fulfill his commitments, or at the very least, cancel them. I would have been fine with a message saying he couldn’t make it. Or even a message after the fact saying he was hung over and slept in or whatever, but crickets. Barring some extreme circumstance, he clearly doesn’t care about his clients. Worse yet, I would have been scammed had I sent a deposit. I think others should be on watch for scam potential, and that potential is high in this case.

Not worth it on the provider side either. They won’t let me delete my ad, so it sits there with all content and photos removed. Waste of time. They don’t charge to place an ad, and the only way to upgrade is with cryptocurrency. Hard pass. To be fair, clients have hired me from MB but it’s rare.

MasseurFinder I was curious to try Brady after all the lively previous discussions on him (linking that thread below for reference). I requested an appointment about three weeks in advance. He asked for a 25% deposit, which I refused saying as a masseur myself I understand why he requires deposits, but I’m sorry I wouldn’t be getting to see him while I was visiting Phoenix since that is a dealbreaker for me. I sent him my ads for reference so he could see who I am, and hopefully recognize that I’m reliable. He said it’s ok he still wants to see me because I look normal (? 🤷‍♂️). I was very flexible about day and time, gave a week timespan saying I can plan around any time he prefers. It was crickets after that. Followed up a week and a half later and he confirmed his *high* pricing which I agreed to, and then he asked for a deposit again, same runaround, and then agreed I can pay his full rate in cash. All good. Morning of: messaged an hour before. Arrived promptly per his instructions, messaged. Nothing. Waited at the door 5-10 mins, then messaged saying I would wait in my Jeep with the AC. A good 20 mins goes by and I call it. No response… Man, oh man, am I glad I did NOT send a deposit. Clients, I feel your pain. I’m bummed out I won’t get to try his skills this trip and I could really use a break. That’s ok. I already booked another local masseur for later in the week. Any others have recent experiences since the last slew of commentary?

Veruca Salt energy!

Posts about providers based outside the US belong in their respective areas of the site designed to organize information about providers in other countries. That’s where it makes sense to look, and it’s inclusive. Why would you want a bunch of eyes on a post that US users are least likely to have experience with? You want relevant impressions, not number of impressions. Asking a moderator directly in the appropriate ask a moderator forum is the right way to go about this. Not passive-aggressively posting this here. It’s whiny. The site mods are doing us all a service by hosting this content at all, and doing a fine job at it, I might add - by working tirelessly to keep the problem posters and terms violating content at bay, proactively shutting down dumpster fire personal attack focused threads, and so on. It’s a lot to manage. Without all that work, the site would be unusable. I’m taking a wild guess that they won’t reorganize the site (also a lot of work) based on this complaint. Also, it doesn’t make sense. Like it or not, this site is US centric, and the majority of users hire primarily in the US. Use the Europe sections to post relevant topics about European providers. Makes sense to me!

On a related note: CashApp no longer supports business accounts, according to a notice I received today. Strictly peer-to-peer now. I guess I have to strike that off my list of accepted payments since I have to report my earnings via payment processors as business income. CashApp is one example of industry wide shifts in policy and regulations. It won’t be long before Venmo and others do the same. Apple Cash (aka Apple Pay) now imposes stricter limits on transactions. More lax if you register (10k/week), or $500/week if you don’t register. Register, meaning: tie your social security number to your account so the IRS and other agencies can monitor you more closely, which puts you more at risk of audits and criminal investigations. Any payments tied to your personal payment processing accounts are subject to investigation since they look like (and ARE) business income. Business accounts you pay taxes on payments received. All above board. Even my Apple Cash payments transfer to my business checking account, which I then pay taxes on. Since they’re limiting our options and preventing us from processing payments legitimately, they’re effectively pushing us more and more toward using cash, of which anyone might only report a portion (or none!). I don’t like that. You can’t legislate our industry away. It exists. Might as well let us pay taxes on our incomes, which benefits everyone in the end. Enforce human trafficking laws. Do not enforce moral attitudes regarding what consenting adults do privately.

As of today, the Visa option is still unavailable. One of my clients confirmed on his end. If the Visa option comes back online at all, it will probably be a while. Some users are able to still use Visa, but I’m guessing those are one off exceptions. Who on earth could deny our boy, Danny? 🤣

MasseurFinder RentMasseur Any experiences?

He DID book, and by some miracle he actually showed up when he said he would, we had the session, and he paid my rate. He was happy and plans to book again when I am in his city. That was that. Almost never do these end well, but this one did.

1) You could request to schedule a brief phone call to discuss all your questions, concerns, and to get a feel for the guy. 5 mins tops. Typically free, but do not expect your provider to pick up a random unannounced call from you any time, anywhere. Schedule the call, or ask if it’s ok to call. This minimizes the time your provider is spending seeing an alert from you, giving you his attention, then seeing another alert, stopping what he is doing to respond again, and so on. That process can drag on for hours, days, or even weeks if we don’t put boundaries around it. That process of setting boundaries is tricky because we have to strike a delicate balance between being firm, direct, honest, and polite. A lot of clients get butt hurt when we politely set a boundary instead of simply caving to their constant niggling one liner texts, demands for attention, and random half sentence questions / statements. Sometimes I get irritated and impatient and don’t handle it as well as I usually do. A succinct few paragraph messages back and forth will cover everything you and he need. A brief phone call respects his time. If you’re not calling: Summarize all your questions, scenarios, requirements, wants and needs into one or just a few text messages. I appreciate these because I can answer them all in one shot. The guys who keep asking one question, then another, and then half another, and then re-ask the same questions…these are the time wasters, the people we want to block. Here is a recent RentMen messenger exchange as an example of what NOT to do. Keep in mind the client waits a while between messages before sending another demand for attention. It’s really strung out over many hours at a stretch.

It’s a huge turn off for me. A massage gun displayed prominently in an ad communicates that this masseur uses the gun regularly as part of his routine, and that he doesn’t have a plan for how he uses the full time using only his body. Almost like it’s a crutch, or a way to fill time not actually massaging. I know one masseur who told me he uses it for that exact purpose. One of my worst massage experiences was with a guy who used a massage gun. He told me his hands were too tired from texting clients all day. I call BS. I want a real person to use their body - hands, arms, etc to massage me. Not turn on a device to substitute for what only a real, live human can do - a human I am paying quite a bit of money to do. Also there’s the human contact, the physical touch (especially from a man) you just can’t substitute. Massage guns have their purpose. I just find those situations better suited outside the context of a pricey session with a masseur. Now, sex toys, on the other hand…those can be fun. Best used in the context of an escort session though. Or a combo massage/escort session.

^Yes, this. I do not ask for Ubers but reliability and accountability is what providers are after, not simply to “expense” travel directly to the client. Just the other night I agreed to an outcall for a client 10 miles away. After agreeing on a rate for services, location, and what I should wear, I drove to his hotel, telling him right when I left that I am on my way and gave a precise ETA. I messaged when I arrived, saying I parked. He then read my latest message and immediately blocked me on the app. Such a waste of time. We never know with a new client if he’s serious or just playing games. It’s almost like this client deliberately wanted to waste my time and gas. He could have just said never mind before I left, or even on the way. Christ, he could have said anything at all after I arrived if he was a decent human being. Just blocking me is such a dick move. Coward. I’m not saying asking for an Uber is right or the way I personally do business, but I understand why some providers prefer an Uber. Not to make the client pay the travel expense, so much as it gives the provider greater confidence that the client will actually follow through, and if he doesn’t, the cost is on the client, not the provider. Requesting an Uber is another form of requesting a deposit. We’re not making money on deposits. We are making money on time spent with serious clients. This is one of many ways to identify more serious clients.

Yes, our views differ. A date is an imperfect analogy because this is business, but I’ll roll with it to walk through my thinking. All is well and good if neither party is contacting the other for a second or third date. The problem is when Party 1 contacts Party 2 for another date and Party 2 doesn’t want to see Party 1 anymore. It’s so easy for Party 2 to simply say, “No, thank you.” Or any unambiguous variation therof. That way Party 1 knows not to keep asking. To say anything different would be leaving the door open to Party 1 continuing to follow up, and that wastes Party 1’s time and energy to keep following up. To tell someone in so many words or between the lines that you don’t respect their time and energy is rude (my opinion, yours apparently differs on this point). The polite thing would be to not waste Party 1’s time and energy. “I’m going to a work function that night” means the reason Party 2 is not seeing Party 1 is because Party 2 has plans. Party 1 will keep following up, and that wastes Party 1’s time to have to keep coming up with more excuses each time. It behooves Party 2 to be honest and straightforward, so as to not waste their own time dealing with responding to more invitations from Party 1. Plus it’s respectful to Party 1 because Party 1 can spend their time and energy elsewhere. If Party 1 is polite, they won’t keep asking when Party 2 states simply and directly that they aren’t interested in meeting again. Simple as that. Everyone is being polite and we are all much better off for it. It’s only when Party 1 ignores Party 2’s polite response that it’s necessary for Party 2 to resort to dealing with the situation by ignoring/blocking/ghosting, lying, etc. At this point, these behaviors are perfectly acceptable because it’s the only way to get Party 1 to leave Party 2 alone. My argument is to give Party 1 a chance to show respect. By jumping straight to the impolite response from the get go, Party 2 is saying that they don’t trust Party 1 on respect their “No” response. A lot of the time Party 1 is a decent human and will respect a polite decline. I’m saying it’s polite to have faith in humanity, to give people a chance to reciprocate your respect. Jumping straight to block/ignore/lie assumes everyone is bad and won’t respect your boundaries when you say “No”. You may be surprised at how many DO respect “No” and don’t contact you anymore. All I’m saying is it’s polite to give people that chance, and by doing so, to acknowledge and respect the humanity of that other person. Ghosting I view as impolite, lazy, and cowardly. It’s like you care so much about how the other person will take your “No”, that you feel it’s better to say nothing at all. “No response is a response” is the toxic hookup culture bleeding its way into our daily lives. But these are not hookups. It’s business and these are people on both sides. It’s all too easy to dehumanize one another through a screen. I argue that by being honest and straightforward, you’re embracing your own humanity and respecting that of others. Just because ghosting/ignoring/lying is normal and common does not make it right. But y’all have different opinions about it being ok to ghost. I’ve said my peace. I’ll agree to disagree.

I believe the question was: how to politely “fire” a masseur? Here are a bunch of impolite suggestions I’ve heard so far: Lie Block Ignore Joke about STIs The polite, mature thing to do is tell him directly in your own words that you are not interested in hiring him anymore. Most masseurs will get it and stop contacting you. Only a small minority of guys will fail to respect your wishes, in which case it makes sense to block or ignore. The roundabout suggestions offered here only invite drama, resentment, confusion, and disrespect from both sides. Personally I hope you all take a moment to consider how to better treat your fellow humans. You are all adults, many with 1.5x, 2x, or more years under your belt than the men you hire. You should all know better by now. Use your words, fellow adults. It’s not difficult.

I agree! I wouldn’t expect any extras for this price range. Extras are unimportant to me and I really enjoy good therapy. Sounds like a great find. Thanks for sharing @aeikaryoko

Brett’s RentMasseur Profile Anyone here with experience? Someone referred me, says he does good work.

^Something along these lines is the best way, I think, to go about it. You’re being direct but not mean or rude. You’re probably open to hiring other masseurs (just not this particular masseur), so rather than lying, you could be direct and upfront. You don’t even have to say why. Placing the ball in your own court to contact him gives you say in whether you want to engage with him in the future. Maybe that is never, and that’s ok. The result is the same: your masseur knows not to contact you going forward. There’s no need to block. Blocking is for people who won’t respect boundaries, or people playing childish games on hookup apps. Would you appreciate being blocked or ghosted? (No, it’s a rhetorical question). Then don’t do it to someone else without reason. Him asking if you want to hire him isn’t exactly violating boundaries. Persistent? Yes. But hardly something to be upset about. In fact, I would commend your masseur for being proactive in giving you an opportunity to book again. I do this with my clients when I travel to other cities and most of them book again. In Dallas, some of my clients missed out because they waited too long after my notice ahead and I was too booked up to accommodate the times they could see me, especially for same day last minute requests or narrow windows of availability. I easily could have made those times work if they booked ahead. That’s why I contact them ahead. Really, it’s a courtesy I am extending by taking the time to individually reach out to give existing clients scheduling priority. I book up either way, so extending that priority to my existing clients is a privilege. I understand not everyone is able or willing to book ahead, and sure not everyone will want to repeat as in your case, but your masseur spending time reaching out to you individually is a favor to you as much as it is a way for him to generate business. You might do him a reciprocal courtesy by helping him conserve his time now that he knows not to reach out. It’s a win-win. Here is a sample response message: “Thanks for reaching out and for taking my appointment last [month, year, summer, whatever]. I don’t anticipate hiring you for more sessions when you’re in town, but I’ll be sure to reach out if anything changes.”

I’m guessing it will take some time for RM to switch the site back to accept Visa card payments again. That, or they are making exceptions for their most loyal clients and best reviewed providers. RM responded to me by comping a month of membership to reactivate my ad and give me time to get a MasterCard before my next membership payment becomes due. @moonlight the cryptocurrency discussion is on other threads, so I don’t want to derail this topic, but here is a bit on my feelings about crypto: 1) is not at all private. Forensics are easy to do for anyone with a cause. The ledger is public. You don’t even need a warrant to gain access or analyze. Your crypto account is tied to your identity. 2) offers no consumer protection. Once it’s transferred, it’s gone. There is no insurance, and no company willing to reimburse you for a loss when something goes wrong. Say you paid for goods or services but never received them. That money you sent you can’t dispute or ever get back. 3) the government tracks your crypto holdings. Remember, all crypto is tied to your identity, and the government knows who you are. You may as well be on a criminal watchlist, especially if you fail to report your crypto holdings or fail to pay taxes on crypto earnings. IRS tax forms now have a line asking directly if you hold crypto. 4) crypto is not yet widely accepted or used. Money is only good as a means of exchange when you can use it everywhere (or nearly everywhere). While this may change, for now, it makes crypto essentially worthless as money, unless you go out of your way to only use merchants who accept crypto. 5) Holding any amount of crypto may as well be a sign on your back asking the government to investigate you. No thanks. 6) Crypto is highly volatile compared to real money. Real money has its problems, and it’s not perfectly stable, but real money is more stable than crypto. For this reason, people hold it for a long time hoping to someday cash out. They treat it as an appreciable asset, like a house. You can’t pay for groceries with your house, and you aren’t taking out a second mortgage on your house to pay for your monthly water bill.

Same happened to me this week. RentMen (and RentMasseur, same company) suddenly stopped taking Visa card payments. No warning, nothing. They expired my ad because my recurring membership payment won’t process. It’s Mastercard, bitcoin, or tough luck. This move is mostly a money grab giving Mastercard exclusivity and RentMen/RentMasseur a discount on payment processing fees. The official story from the webmaster to me is they dropped Visa to comply with new regulatory requirements. Even if that’s true, it’s purely incidental. Yes, payment processors are running for the hills away from anything that looks like it enables or endorses criminal activity, but even legal things including fan site content and traditional porn. Just look at a lot of the updated terms and conditions over the past 6-12 months. You have to read the text. They don’t put it in the summaries and highlights emails. The moral police are coming down hard on this and related industries. I’m all for stopping human trafficking, but you can never eliminate the sex work trade by legislation, social norms or peer pressure. Wherever demand and supply exist, so does a market. I digress…maybe save that for related threads. Imagine how timely all this action is with the election coming up in 3 months…ok I’ll stop there before getting too political. We all know RM prioritizes their bottom line above everything else. They forced me to put pictures in my private gallery last month, for example. The pictures weren’t even nude, but they deemed them x-rated. It was simply to add content to a gallery that members would have to buy a membership to view. I send pics when requested, but it’s just a way for RM to squeeze more $ out of both clients escorts. Lame. The dropping Visa without warning debacle sent me into a tailspin because I don’t use MasterCard or bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency. I’m on an extended road trip and some of the cities I’m visiting over the next few weeks are new to me…so no existing clients to rely on or reach out to. It’s purely advertising I have to go on to fill my books. I freaked out. I scrambled to a grocery store in Columbus yesterday in the little free time I had left to get a Mastercard gift card. RM will let me upload the card because it recognizes that it’s a Mastercard, but it still won’t process the payment, presumably because it’s a prepaid type. F*ck me. I managed this morning to apply for, and receive a new MasterCard with one of my financial institutions. Fortunately I got a digital card I can use until I receive the physical card in the mail. As of this morning, my RentMasseur and RentMen recurring payments are switched over to the new MC. Fingers crossed they don’t go exclusively to crypto without notice. Then I would really be screwed. Crypto is problematic in so many ways. Fine if RM wants to offer the option, but forcing us to use cryptocurrency would make me quit the platform tbh. This whole thing is exhausting.

Ari trained informally many years back under Newell, a masseur I work with in San Diego (ads are under MuscleGingerXL). I haven’t seen Ari myself, so take this with a grain of salt, but the consensus I’ve heard around town is you go to Ari for sensual work, not actual massage therapy. I would adjust your expectations accordingly. Others please do post any updates and mention of you have had better luck on the therapeutic side with him. We all evolve over time.

^ +1 I use the “Available Now” feature judiciously. Sometimes I have between 1-3 hours between clients which is not enough time to flag Available Now, have the client see it, reach out, confirm a booking, and then have the client travel to me, and complete the appointment, and maintain a 30 min gap between clients, all before my next client arrives. Sometimes yes this scenario happens to work out smoothly if all works perfectly within that timeframe where the client sees Available Now right when I flag, and not 55 mins after I flag. So…sometimes Available Now means available to respond to questions, make appointments (and to deal with constant client bs, but that’s another thread). Sometimes it means Available Now to start working asap if you contact me shortly after I flag it, but if you wait too long the window closes. Other times it means truly that I have nothing going on for several hours and I’m ready to work asap. Which means I’m not sitting around. I’m going to the gym or running an errand to make the most of my time when I’m not actively seeing clients. So maybe it takes me 30 mins or longer to complete my workout, shower, or drive back from a store or something. I think that’s pretty reasonable. There is no way to tell what’s happening with your provider at that particular time you text after seeing Available Now. There is only one flag for us to use…so we use it. You can’t get mad at us for using our free time in other ways than simply staring at our phones, unblinking, waiting for it to buzz after we flag Available Now. We have things to do. It’s impossible to guarantee that someone will be available immediately after you see the flag and text. You might have an initial delay from a guy who legitimately is available, but perhaps he is on the phone when you text, or in the middle of a task he can’t pause immediately, he’s in the shower, or what have you. It may take a short time before we see the text. Other times we see your message right away and respond. Client 1 sees Available Now, texts me, and books an appointment for some short time later, maybe 30 mins or an hour from the time they text. So far, the Available Now feature is working as intended. Sometimes only a few minutes later client 2 (who also saw Available Now flagged) texts requesting an appointment. I tell client 2 yes I can do X time later (in order to go after client 1 who is already on the way). That X time might be two hours or more later from the time client 2 is initially texting. Client 1 thinks I’m waiting around for him to show up whenever he goddamn feels like it, because after all, I am “Available Now”, indefinitely as far as he is concerned. So he shows up half an hour later than he said he would, which makes it that much more difficult for me to confidently set a time for client 2, so I pad half an hour to avoid potential conflict from client 1 taking his sweet time arriving late. Uncertainty around floating client arrival times is certainly part of the equation.

Poor baby…

I’ve had interest from clients inquiring about ASMR and related experiences, usually younger clients, but it’s so infrequent that I haven’t seen the point in offering ASMR as a service. To echo the above, it’s not a sexual service. That’s not really the point, but I suppose if you’re hell bent on making it sexual, you could.

A while back, one of my Dallas clients posted a negative reaction to a masseur he and I both really like. Once I shared that this masseur also creates fan site content, the client was grossed out and presumably doesn’t see that masseur any more. That’s unfortunate because that masseur really is a great guy and does good work. The puzzling thing about the client reaction is that the masseur and the client were not having sex, so I really don’t understand the relevance. I imagine this masseur had just as much sex privately before as he now does on camera - which begs the question: why should it matter? Does this information change how you think about your masseurs? Is it hot and exciting to you? Is it “icky” thinking about what he does outside his massage sessions with you, either privately or for an audience? Do you worry more about your sexual health? Do you think his level of risk is any different when he has sex off screen vs sex on screen? Does his notoriety appeal to you? I’ve considered creating content for a long time, but I’m just not ready to take on the time commitment, among other reservations. I’m wondering whether creating sexual content would have a positive or negative impact on my business. What do you guys think?

^refreshing