Teens forced to die in sick ‘snuff’ films & babies snatched in brothels – my dark journey into world of sex trafficking

AN ATTRACTIVE young woman in her mid-20s enters the London headquarters of a famous international bank.

Impeccably dressed in a blue dress and heels, she could be a high-flying graduate trainee, investing money from her first job.

She gets her receipt for her deposit and walks out to a waiting car where the illusion ends.

Her handler takes the receipt and drives her to a luxury apartment where the doors are kept locked from the outside.

There she returns to a daily routine of forced prostitution for wealthy clients, effectively a prisoner, unable to withdraw money or do anything on her own.

If she told the bank clerk what was really happening she would risk being thrown into prison or deported. She’s been warned no one will believe her anyway.

But if the bank account manager paid closer attention, he might realise something is off.

Where does all the money flowing into her account every month originate from? Why does it come from so many different payees? And why is she transferring so much of it to someone else?

But no one asks or raises the alarm. She’s just another victim hidden in plain sight, drawn into the sinister world of human trafficking which generates a staggering £116billion a year for its perpetrators.

But while desperate people can be exploited for drugs, organs and labour, the most lucrative form of trafficking is sex.

In a shocking case last week, a Ukranian OnlyFans model was found dumped on the side of a road in Dubai, with a broken spine, arms and legs, after falling victim to a sex trafficking gang. Sadly she is far from alone.

In her groundbreaking new book, investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau reveals the disturbing scale of sex trafficking – and how asylum centres, banks and even Airbnb owners unwittingly allow it to flourish unchecked.

Young victims

Some child trafficking victims are smuggled out of migrant centres and foster homes.

Daria was just 14 when, after losing both her parents in a Russian air strike in Ukraine, a relative helped shuttle her to the UK where she applied for asylum.

As she languished in a dismal shelter for refugee children during the lengthy asylum process, she was approached by a man who promised her a better place to stay, as well as a waitress job to help her earn some spending money.

All she had to do, the man said, was convince the shelter she was staying with a relative. Once free of the shelter, the man gave her English lessons and a bedroom in his own home.

Even though the waitress job never materialised, she was pleased to be away from the shelter.

What she didn’t realise was the man had other plans for her. He was a trafficker and, within weeks, had plied Daria with drugs and sexually abused her.

In a month, he prostituted her out to clients that included pornographers. If she reported him, he said, her asylum application would be nullified.

Police eventually rescued her in a sting operation involving other young war refugees, including a number of adolescent boys who had been tricked into leaving state-run shelters and ended up being trafficked for sex.

Yet the shelter where she was originally housed continued to take UK government cash for her care, long after she left. It was only during a routine audit that authorities realised she had never checked back in with officials after she left.

Daria, whose case was profiled in a US State Department report on child trafficking tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is now 15 and, although she was eventually taken to a new shelter and granted asylum to stay in the UK, she has since returned home.

Her case is just one of 2,600 who are regularly trafficked into the UK for sex.

And the unbroken payments to the shelter demonstrate how victims like Daria go under the radar, even in the UK.

Sex trafficking victims rarely identify themselves to potential rescuers – because traffickers warn their victims that people pretending to help will abuse them even more severely.

Other women feel so demeaned they begin to feel they don't deserve to be saved from sex trafficking rings.

Sex trafficking

Modern slavery affects between 40 and 50 million people, only slightly less than the entire population of England.

Human trafficking is a form of modern slavery but the UK considers them as separate, albeit intertwined, crimes.

Every year, sex trafficking nets around £77 billion of the total generated by human trafficking.

There are an estimated 16,000 migrants forced to sell sex in Europe at any given time.

And, even in Europe, victims are hiding in plain sight.

In southern Italy, the open-air sex market where newly trafficked sex slaves are trained is an open secret.

German tourists were able to book the serves of 24 Nigerian women for the weekend, 24 hours a day with no breaks.

For the women it’s a break from their usual clientele of priests and truckers.

Those forced into prostitution account for 22 per cent of human trafficking victims.

Others are forced into porn and even snuff films where they are killed for the thrill of paying customers.

Ethiopian girl ‘Daisy’, 12, was kidnapped from the streets of Italy and was next seen in a series of pornographic films on the dark web where she was often tied up and gagged.

Her last appearance was on a snuff film channel which subscribers to the live feed paid more than £400 to watch. It was likely shot in Russia and investigators believe she was killed.

As well as threats of violence and being deported, victims are often held in ‘debt bondage', where they are told they have to reimburse the cost of their travel – plus interest – to earn freedom.

On average, a victim will owe her trafficker £23,225 but to pay that back she has to work 14 hour days, charging £20 a time for sex.

Older women often chaperone young girls, exploiting them as workers in the hope of being rewarded with asylum.

Tragically, if a young girl has been forcibly sterilised, which can occur in war-torn countries, their street value increases.

Fetish brothels

Globally, the majority of the victims are Chinese.

In 2020, a group of Chinese women were recruited online to move to Colombia where they were told they would marry wealthy Colombian men.

In reality, the women were trafficked to work in fetish brothels.

Trafficking into China is also a problem. In 2019, authorities there found 45 North Korean women who had been sold to underground Chinese brothels after escaping the oppressive dictatorship of Kim Jong Un.

They were subject to everything from systematic rape to forced pregnancy to produce offspring.

Some North Korean women sold to Chinese traffickers end up in Europe.

The trafficking industry’s influence is not confined to the streets, and not all of its proceeds are monetary.

High-profile names

Human trafficking is generally thought to be an underworld crime associated with desperate poverty, which is exploited by mafias, organised crime syndicates, drug cartels, irregular migration and human smugglers.

The star-studded trafficking case of American financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was found hanging in his prison cell in a New York City federal jail in 2019, put trafficking on the map in a very different way.

He and his British socialite accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year prison sentence in Florida, were alleged to have recruited and paid girls as young as 14 for sex.

When Epstein and his wealthy friends tired of them, Epstein and Maxwell coerced them to recruit other girls their age.

They are alleged to have pimped the girls out for cash and influence.

Politicians, lawyers and entrepreneurs are all alleged to have used Epstein’s private jet and visited his so-called ‘paedophile island.’

In her landmark book on the case, Perversion of Justice, Julie K. Brown explained how Epstein was able to get away with the crimes.

“He didn’t do this alone,”; she said. “He had a whole ecosystem that he created that allowed this to happen.”;

The same is true of all traffickers – they do not operate in isolation but rely on wider networks.

The ecosystems that enable trafficking in both upper and under worlds involve many parties and touch on other industries, from financial services to the travel industry.

Many of those who had been trafficked in Epstein’s vile operation, including Prince Andrew's accuser Virginia Giuffre eventually came forward and won settlements from his estate.

In underworld trafficking, most victims’ best hope is survival.

They will never be reimbursed for the sale of their bodies or their labour.

The flow of money from these sales is gaining interest in big banks. In 2020, Deutsche Bank in New York and the Virgin Islands agreed to pay £116 million in penalties for facilitating Epstein’s sex trafficking.

In 2023, they agreed to a further £58 million settlement with the victims.

Another big bank, JPMorgan, settled a similar suit tied to Epstein’s sex trafficking charges, paying some $290m in penalties.

Dozens of other banks and subsidiaries earned money from Epstein’s criminal behaviour, ignoring red flags for the sake of millions in profits made both through Epstein and his clients who channelled money to him for the use of the girls he procured.

Anti-trafficking groups have long been pressurising big banks to stop turning a blind eye to shell accounts that allow traffickers to launder money unabated.

But they struggle to apply pressure to financial institutions to take stronger action in identifying accounts tied to traffickers, even when there are obvious indicators of money laundering.

They urge in-person bank employees to keep an eye out for suspicious activity like adults opening new accounts with a “chaperone”; accompanying them, or account holders who have no tax number or who deposit curious sums.

Banks and financial institutions are required to play a major role in hunting out tax evaders, terrorists and money laundering tied to drug and arms trafficking.

Yet they often give human traffickers a pass.

Airbnb brothels

It is not only traffickers who make money from sex victims; so too do hotels where they are taken to meet clients and Airbnb owners, whose properties are commonly used by traffickers because of the anonymity they offer.

Anti-trafficking groups say if owners took a different approach, they could actively try to stop trafficking.

In 2019, one landlord did raise the alarm, suspecting a teen girl with three “sketchy”; men may have been trafficked.

Airbnb did not comment but suggested that any hosts who suspect trafficking should call their country’s national trafficking hotline and can refuse a rental if suspicious.

Many Airbnb apartment hosts never meet the guests, who just use key boxes and other anonymous means to check in.

The potential for abuse of the system is striking – but campaigners say following the money is still one of the best ways we can combat the sick rackets.

Silvija Krupena, director of the London-based RedFlag Accelerator financial intelligence unit at RedCompass Labs, says: “Everyone can and must do more, but the financial sector is uniquely placed to disrupt human trafficking.

“Financial data can reveal human crimes flowing through systems which are often hidden in plain view.”;

Every Body Counts: Money, Lies, And The Hidden Trade In Human Lives by Barbie Latza Nadeau was published by Ithaka on March 27 at £20.