A dossier of damning evidence that human traffickers are using the UK’s biggest community website to sell sex slaves is revealed today.
A Sunday Mail investigation found four girls with poor English who we suspect of being trafficked all operating under the same handle advertised on Vivastreet.co.uk.
We got involved after a leading anti-trafficking organisation said it had experienced a 42 per cent increase in sexually exploited women coming to them for help in the last year. Some of the women said they had been advertised on sites such as Vivastreet.
Campaigners and law enforcement groups have blamed the ease with which slave masters can hijack legitimate online marketplaces.
In the four ads identified, all of the women were from Romania – a notorious trafficking hotspot.
They spoke little English despite their ads being literate, another tell-tale sign that they are being controlled.
Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance (TARA) fears sites such as Vivastreet have made it easier for gangsters to cash in on their victims’ misery.
The group’s operations manager, Bronagh Andrew, said: “The traffickers view the woman as a commodity to maximise their profit. They’re effectively being abused online and on websites.
“The trafficked women do not work the streets but operate from flats and houses, where they are kept against their will.”
Lewis Hunt, operations manager of the National Crime Agency’s (NCA) Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Unit, said there are about 7500 sites in Britain where sex is advertised.
He added: “Websites advertising sex with women are among the biggest enablers of prostitution in Britain.
“We’ve been working with some sites including Vivastreet to make them aware that human traffickers are using women and for them to take steps to prevent this happening.
“In Britain, it is not illegal for these types of sites to operate and to carry adverts from women. The money traffickers make from sexual exploitation is used to carry out further trafficking and fund other forms of organised crime.”
Vivastreet is one of the top two classified ad sites in the UK and the ninth biggest in the world. Sunday Mail investigators trawled the site, where browsers can look at adverts for cars, clothing and jewellery.
However, its “escort” section contained thousands of profiles featuring women advertising sex for up to £250 per hour.
Last week, it carried more than 600 ads for sex workers in Scotland, most of them in Edinburgh and Glasgow. We found four ads placed by a registered user who joined the site in August 2016.
Three women – Lora, Ameria and Rayssa – were based in Glasgow’s east end while the fourth, Sophia, was in Falkirk.
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Our team contacted them on mobile numbers on their profile page. They did not answer but replied via text – another indication of coercion.
A reporter visited Lora in a tenement block in Dennistoun, Glasgow, that was in need of refurbishment, with plaster badly cracked in places. She led him into a sparsely furnished top-floor flat.
Her Vivastreet profile claimed she spoke English, Italian and Spanish but she was barely able to communicate other than to tell our reporter she charged £60 for sex. He made his excuses and left.
We found the same four women on another website used by sex workers, where they were described as Romanian.
Vivastreet is owned by the Digital Ventures group. Its headquarters is in London, with 150 staff and operations in 26 countries.
It began in the late 90s in New York when Frenchman Yannick Pons set up Roomgo, an online flat-sharing service.
He founded Vivastreet to cash in on the classified marketplace sector.
Vivastreet was blamed in an inquiry last year by a Westminster all-party parliamentary group on prostitution for allowing sexual exploitation through their online adverts. The site is free to use with profits coming from fees paid by those placing the ads.
Last June, Paris prosecutors accused Vivastreet of pimping women via their websites. Its sex ads were removed in France but they still exist in the UK.
In December 2017, a Romanian human trafficking gang who forced 11 women into prostitution in Blackburn and Preston were found to have advertised them on Vivastreet.
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Detectives discovered that one of the gang had placed £25,000 worth of ads and was even given an account manager.
In the same year, three men who sexually exploited a 14-year-old girl after advertising her as an 18-year-old on Vivastreet were jailed for a total of 18 years at Birmingham Crown Court.
The NCA is the lead organisation in Britain for fighting human trafficking.
It said some ads throw up clues to women being enslaved, including an offer of unprotected sex and the same background in photographs.
Campaign group Anti-Slavery International said: “Girls working in a rundown place, in a poor area, not speaking the language and struggling for communication make it more likely they’ve been trafficked.”
A spokesman for Vivastreet said: “We take the issue of exploitation extremely seriously and we have a wide range of measures in place to enhance user safety, and detect and remove inappropriate material.
“We’re working closely with the Home Office and law enforcement agencies, such as the National Crime Agency, to help develop an industry-wide approach to identifying and preventing online trafficking, and we urge all other online platforms to engage with this process.”
Assistant Chief Constable Gillian MacDonald of Police Scotland said: “Victims of human trafficking may arrive after being kidnapped, smuggled or tricked by a friend offering a job and the opportunity of a new life.
“However, they soon discover that their lives are not their own and they are forced into a life of exploitation with no way of escaping.
“Trafficking exists in communities across Scotland and has become so sophisticated, it often goes unnoticed.”
Scottish Labour said: “There must be tighter controls to vet adverts online and to truly tackle trafficking and exploitation of women, we must focus on those who pay for it and make them criminally responsible.”
Minister for Community Safety, Ash Denham, said: “Trafficking and exploitation are an abuse of human rights that cannot be tolerated.
“We have increased funding for victim support services to more than £3million over three years and have commissioned research on child trafficking routes as we continue to work to eradicate this terrible crime.”
