OAKLAND — A 17-year-old girl known in court records as “Jane Doe” had been missing for roughly six weeks when her pictures turned up on an online prostitution advertisement based in the Bay Area, authorities said.

So on Nov. 13, an Oakland police investigator went undercover and responded to the ad, posing as a potential sex buyer, and arranged to meet the teen at the hotel in the 1800 block of Embarcadero in Oakland, court records show. When she showed up, a 31-year-old man was allegedly with her, driving a white Tesla, and carrying a phone that had exchanged communications with Doe more than 1,500 times.

Authorities allege that the man, Melvin Williams, was trafficking Doe, based on an “immense” amount of electronic evidence. Williams was allegedly saved on the girl’s phone as “Daddy,”

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