Sex-slave traffickers are widening their net to Africa and South America in search of victims, police said yesterday at the inauguration of a new investigation unit.

Commander Sue Wilkinson, who will oversee an 11-man Scotland Yard team with a £1 million annual budget, said that the traffickers who trapped women into prostitution and also supplied adults and children for forced labour were the modern equivalent of the slave traders of 200 years ago. “Trafficking is a global problem affecting every continent and most countries around the world,” she said.

Police say that people are being smuggled into Britain to work illegally for little or no wages. Sometimes they are brought to work on farms, receiving the minimum wage or nothing at all and living in fear of their bosses. Some are working off the cost of being smuggled in.

Most of those forced into the sex trade are from Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and southeast Europe, but in the past year some have started to appear from the Far East. More recently still, victims are starting to come from Africa and South America.

Detective Superintendent Mark Ponting said women were duped into coming to Britain to work in bars and restaurants and then found themselves forced into prostitution. Gangs sold the women for as much as £8,000 each, with the pimps who bought them earning £800 a day from each victim. The youngest girl police have found was 14.

The women are told that if they try to escape they will be picked up by police, who will also rape them and then dump them back with their families, revealing the shameful facts of their lives as prostitutes.

Officers from the new team have already visited Lithuania, which has a large recruiting network spread across the country. One of the victims, “Maria”, told yesterday how she was brought to Britain from Lithuania at the age of 15.

She and a friend were recruited in 2005 by a woman who offered them holiday work in a bar in London. Maria travelled alone. When she arrived she was met by two Albanian men and a Lithuanian woman, who promptly took her passport away. From London she was taken to Birmingham.

“I thought they were trying to find a job for me,” she said.

“We went to a house where I was met by a lot of girls. I was given new clothes and told that I had to work. I was then told I had been sold and if I tried to escape it would be very bad. I was so scared, I was crying and I didn’t know what to do.”

Maria would be locked in whenever she was not working. She was never paid and told by her brutal Albanian captor that she owed him £3,500. She said: “He used to beat me and rape me. I was in fear of him all the time. He told me I was in debt to him and threatened to kill me if I tried to escape.”

“He told me that once I had paid the money I would be free, but I didn’t believe him” After an escape attempt, Maria was sold on to another pimp and sent to Coventry where she carried on working as a prostitute. Sold again, she was moved to Sheffield and finally escaped after being taken to a nightclub to find clients. She broke down in the toilet and two British girls smuggled her out after hearing her story.

Maria later gave evidence against her captors. Three Albanians were jailed, for 17 years, 18 years and 7 years.

Sold into vice

£8,000 How much the women are auctioned for

£800 How much they might earn in a day

15 Age of Maria when she was brought to Britain from Lithuania

£3,500 Amount that Maria was told she owed her captor

£1m Budget of Scotland Yard’s new investigation unit

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