On any given day at the Del Rey Hotel and Casino in San Jose, dozens of prostitutes and their prospective clients converge at the main bar to engage in the perennial business activity of haggling for sexual services.

In Costa Rica, entire websites are dedicated to instructing North American and European sexual tourists to not pay more than $100 per sexual tryst, which is commonly agreed to last about an hour. To this effect, one particularly active site is Costa Rica Ticas, where forum members warn each other that only the best looking prostitutes command the $100 fee; all others should be negotiated downward, and the discussion threads on this parsimonious endeavor go on for several pages.

Meanwhile, call girls from Costa Rica working in Honduras are being paid thousands of dollars per day for sexual services; however, their clients are certainly not cheapskate sexual tourists.

Last year, a series of investigative articles published by Honduras national newspaper La Prensa looked into the “prepago” phenomenon in that Central American nation. The investigation was prompted by a money laundering incident involving sexy escorts from Costa Rica and Chile who allegedly worked as money couriers for corrupt officials who defrauded Honduras’ social security system.

In Latin America, the term “prepago” is often used to describe women who discreetly engage in prostitution. The term literally translates to “prepaid,” although a money exchange does not necessarily have to take place before the sexual act, only the arrangement.

In Brazil, the Portuguese term “garota de programa” (timetable girl) is more accurate than prepago in Spanish. What takes place beforehand is an agreement of terms such as date, time, place, and consideration. In essence, there is some expectation of a verbal or electronic contract in the prepago business, as opposed to acts of prostitution that more spontaneously take place in brothels, discos, nude cabarets, or at street corners.

Not long after The Costa Rica Star published an article about the incident in Honduras, national television network Teletica and daily tabloid Diario Extra launched their own investigations, which revealed that some of the call girls named by the press in Honduras were lingerie models from San Jose, who earn a living on the local “pasarela” circuit (a raunchier version of a Victoria’s Secret fashion show) are often rumored to travel to Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and Miami to explore lucrative prepago opportunities camouflaged as modeling contracts and fashion shows.

The investigative reports by La Prensa in revealed that many women arrive in Honduras from Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile and other countries that have little visa requirements to enter the country. Call girls from Costa Rica tend to be in high demand because Honduran clients think of them as more being more refined, friendlier and very feminine. There is a perception of a gene pool that has been more thoroughly mixed in Costa Rica, and clients also seem to believe that Ticas are more liberal and in greater touch with their sexuality.

As a result of the above perceptions and assumptions, call girls from Costa Rica are often paid nearly 45,000 lempiras, more than $2,000 per day. Unless they are contracted through a prepago service on Facebook or through exclusive BlackBerry Messenger groups, escorts from Costa Rica do not usually work by the hour in Honduras; the minimum arrangement is three hours for $500. By comparison, a construction worker in Costa Rica earns about $27 per day.

The presence of Ticas in the prepago sphere of Honduras has not gone unnoticed by local prostitutes, who are trying to increase their allure in order to command higher fees. Some Honduran women have noticed a certain fetish among many clients who prefer call girls who are pursuing higher education degrees; to this effect, younger prostitutes have enrolled in local universities just so they can make themselves more attractive to clients and to enter the lucrative prepago networks.

A 2015 study published by the National Pedagogic University Francisco Morazán surveyed 397 students in Honduras, of which 75 percent affirmed being acquainted with other students who work as prepagos. Nine percent of those surveyed are also aware of the prices and how they can go about arranging trysts. Furthermore, seven percent said they have used the prepago service more than once and would consider doing it again.