About a dozen people were arrested in cities across the US on Tuesday for running what authorities called a sophisticated sex trafficking operation in which hundreds of women were brought from Thailand to the US under fraudulent visas and forced to work as prostitutes to pay off tens of thousands of US dollars in bondage debts.
The women — including one who was forced to have sex with strangers for 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week — were not allowed to move about freely and were “effectively modern day sex slaves,” according to a redacted indictment unsealed on Tuesday.
The arrests, along with the recent arrest of the organization’s boss in Belgium, will effectively dismantle the operation, said Alex Khu, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Minneapolis.
“We feel pretty confident that based on the number of important-position folks we are taking down, we’ll really hurt this organization,” he said in an interview ahead of an official announcement about the arrests.
The indictment charges 17 people with various counts, including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking, conspiracy to commit forced labor, conspiracy to engage in money laundering and conspiracy to commit visa fraud. About a dozen people were arrested in the Minneapolis area, Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles.
Khu said his office began investigating a sex trafficking case in the Twin Cities in January 2014 and discovered it was part of an international ring and “a very sophisticated, complex network operating throughout the United States ... where women are really placed on a circuit, traveling from one city to the next.”
According to the indictment, since 2009, hundreds of women were brought from Bangkok to several US cities, including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Washington and Dallas. The women were from poor backgrounds, spoke little English and were lured with promises of a better life.
The operation’s bosses or traffickers in Thailand entered the women into a bondage debt “contract” in exchange for a visa and travel to the US. As part of the contract, the women would owe a debt ranging from US$40,000 to US$60,000 and would be “owned” by the organization until that debt was repaid.
The women were often encouraged to have breast implants and the cost of the surgery was added to their debt.
Once they arrived in the US, the women were forced to have sex in various “houses of prostitution,” including hotels, massage parlors and apartments. They were not allowed to leave without escorts — who would have sex with the victims as part of their payment.
Khu said the head of the organization, who was based in Thailand, was recently arrested in Belgium for separate trafficking offenses there.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion