Eastern European women are being marketed and sold over the internet by criminal gangs which smuggle them into the UK sex industry to order, The Observer has learnt.
In a disturbing hi-tech twist to the burgeoning and lucrative international trade in prostitutes, gangs are using websites to sell the women 'wholesale' to buyers across Europe, who then put them to work in flats, massage parlours and brothels.
The practice was uncovered by officers at the National Criminal Intelligence Service while carrying out research, due to be published next month, into Russian organised crime.
It is not only Russian criminals who have turned to the web to revolutionise their women-trafficking operations. Gangs from across the former Soviet bloc and the Balkans are now dealing on the internet, as the trade emerges as one of the biggest moneyspinners for European criminals.
The gangs place details of the women for sale on some of the hundreds of sites which have appeared across Europe, offering electronic noticeboards - so-called 'virtual phone boxes' - for prostitutes to advertise their services.
Pimps in the West can then log on and select which women would best suit the market they cater for, before ordering them for delivery, like any other commodity available on the net.
One US site believed to be used by the criminals includes a link to an internet magazine called Streetwalking the World, which carries explicit ads for escorts in Europe, the United States and Australia. There is no suggestion that either site is involved in, or has any knowledge of, the trafficking operations. The emerging role of the net is certain to increase calls for a Europe-wide crackdown on gangs involved in the trafficking of women.
NCIS believes that most of the women being offered for sale on the internet are already working in the sex industry and are willing participants in the trade. In some cases, they may even be sold to men as internet brides.
But there is growing evidence that many of the women being smuggled into the UK have been kidnapped and forced into prostitution against their will. Officers fear that the growing hi-tech sophistication of the trafficking operations will make uncovering their activities even more difficult.
'This is a whole new ball game for the trafficking gangs and therefore for us,' a senior police source said. 'The fact that they can put these human beings out for viewing not only shows how they regard the women, but also underlines how strong the market is.'
The development comes in the wake of a Home Office report last month which revealed that more than 70 per cent of Soho sex workers are now foreign, a substantial number of whom may have been forced to become, in effect, sex slaves.
Police intelligence suggests an increasing number of women are already being held in 'debt bondage' by criminal gangs, who lure them to the West with false promises of jobs. But once here, they confiscate their papers, place them in flats and force them to work as prostitutes.
In many cases, the women are sold to another gang shortly before the debt is paid off, and the cycle begins again. The trade is fuelled by the insatiable appetite of punters for 'new' girls and by the need for pimps to cater for more extreme sexual demands, such as torture, as well as unprotected sex. The trade in imported women is slowly spreading across the UK, centring on cities where there is a major off-street sex industry, such as Glasgow. According to sources in the trade, one flat in the city connected to a sauna offers eastern European women for clients with 'exotic' tastes.
In Edinburgh, three Lithuanian women were deported after police discovered they had been put to work in the city's sex trade by a Russian gang. Two worked in a sauna and the other in a lap-dancing bar, but information that they were working against their will soon went round the city's small but highly competitive industry and police were called in.
