A Mountain Bay Metro Police officer entered Sakura Spa in Schofield in February 2024 after authorities received an anonymous tip on Feb. 7 of that year.
The tipster told officers that a worker had touched their genitals on three occasions. The tipster said they refused twice and regretted the time they allowed it, according to the criminal complaint.
The undercover officer’s experience was different. The employee didn’t ask but simply started touching the officer inappropriately, then offered special services for an extra $20, according to the criminal complaint.
The officer said he’d make another appointment and left. The complaint says Wang arranged the massage in question but did not perform it or participate in the touching.
Police continued investigating and conducting surveillance, ultimately arresting Sakura Spa’s operator, who now faces prostitution-related charges.
Lihua Wang was arrested on Tuesday, Oct. 13, according to jail log records. The arrest caught my attention because the main charge is one I don’t typically see in the jail roster: keeping a place of prostitution, a Class H felony under Wisconsin statutes. She also faces prostitution-masturbation, pandering-solicitation and fourth-degree sexual assault as party to a crime.
Though Wang was arrested on Tuesday, prosecutors didn’t file the criminal complaint until Friday afternoon.
Although the charges are new, it’s not the first time police have suspected some places in the area were offering illegal sexual services.
The Wausau Police Department addressed those concerns back in 2020. A massage therapist said she’d performed massages for 16 years without getting requests of a sexual nature, then started getting a significant number of them after taking over the business. Some 60% of massage therapists at the time said they knew of a business providing extra services.
To address this, Capt. Benjamin Graham said police would start making unannounced stops at these businesses to check whether everyone providing massage therapy was licensed by the state.
Since that time, no major news story broke similar to the Sakura Spa story. A search revealed an April 2021 incident involving prostitution-related citations after a guest at a Weston hotel reported that he’d paid for massage services and not received them—though he later revealed to police that he’d found the woman on a prostitution website.
The Wausonian reached out to Graham to inquire whether those license inspections ever happened, how frequently and whether anything had resulted from them.
The Wausonian then received the following response from Lt. Jacob Chittum of the Wausau Police Department:
Thank you for your email and your concern. At this time, I cannot share many details regarding potential active investigations that may or may not be connected to Mountain Bay’s investigation.
There have been prior license checks and violations. We have also coordinated with the Department of Safety and Professional Services during some of those checks and investigations. We have encountered cases in Wausau where individuals were working without the proper license. It is also common for owners to move employees from other areas of the state or country after a violation occurs at their establishment.
These investigations can be complex and often extend beyond simple licensing violations. The network of individuals involved is typically extensive, with connections across the country.
If criminal referrals or arrests are made involving massage businesses, we would likely issue a corresponding press release.
The Wausonian plans to request records to find out how many licenses had been inspected and potentially revoked as a result of the 2020 policy.
Investigators say Sakura Spa was advertised in the escort section of a website called Skipthegames.eu.
The Wausonian found advertisements listing another Wausau business address and several others in central Wisconsin when reviewing the site Monday afternoon. The listings alone don’t establish who placed the ads or whether illegal activity occurred at those addresses.
Wang told police that she’d sort of inherited the business—the people who previously ran it returned to China and had visa issues that prevented them from coming back to the United States. She said she began running the spa during the pandemic, though she never purchased it.
She said she charged $70 an hour for massages and would pay an employee $30 from each massage and keep $40. Or the whole $70 if she performed it. Investigators described the business as operating primarily through cash transactions.
According to the complaint, Wang estimated that she was paid to masturbate seven or eight customers a month and said she had been working at the massage location since about 2016. Police estimated in the criminal complaint that she would have performed those acts 840 to 960 times based on that monthly estimate over roughly a decade—not a count of individually documented encounters.
Wang allegedly didn’t have a license to perform massages in Wisconsin and told police she was licensed in China but not here, according to the complaint.
Wang was released Thursday, Oct. 15, on a $2,000 cash bond, according to online court records.
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