Facebook plea pays off
A Thai teen who claims she was tricked into the Korean sex trade was rescued just three days after posting details of her plight, writes Wassayos Ngamkham
When Pol Lt Col Thanin Chindamaee received a Facebook message from a 17-year-old girl asking for his help to escape from a brothel in South Korea, at first he didn’t believe it was serious.
But Pol Lt Col Thanin, the deputy chief of Khok Si Suphan police station in Sakon Nakhon, gave it some thought and decided it would do no harm to find out if the plea was true.
He showed the message to a woman friend and together they started to find out more about the girl.
One part of her message read: ‘‘Please help me. I was lured into being a prostitute at a shop called Ayutthaya in Seoul, South Korea. I am being forced to take customers 20 hours a day.’’
Pol Lt Col Thanin and his friend talked with the girl via Facebook’s chat service and became convinced that she really was in trouble and needed help. The girl proved her location by pressing the ‘‘check-in’’ button on Facebook, which reveals the user’s whereabouts to other members. She also showed them photographs of male customers visiting the parlour where she said she was being forced to sleep with them for money.
The girl sent the message on May 14. The next day, Pol Lt Col Thanin and his friend took the evidence to the Social Development and Human Security Ministry and the ministry lodged a complaint with the Royal Thai Police.
Two days later, the case was forwarded to the Anti-Human Trafficking Division (AHTD), which immediately sought help from the Thai consular office in Seoul.
The consular office then sought cooperation from South Korean police, who rescued the girl from the massage parlour.
She was sent back to Thailand on May 18.
The AHTD took the girl into its care immediately after she arrived at Suvarnabhumi airport.
She was questioned the following morning, with the interview being filmed for use in court.
The girl said she was tricked into prostitution by her own aunt, who is married to a South Korean man and lives in Seoul.
The aunt, Phiangjai Kim, 37, arranged for her to work in what she thought was an above-board Thai massage business.
A Korean man and a Thai woman picked her up from Pattaya on May 4 and then took her to Suvarnabhumi airport the next morning to fly to Seoul, where she would begin work.
A group of Korean men picked her up at Incheon airport in Seoul. They took away her passport before taking her to an apartment near her new workplace.
Fortunately, she told authorities, the men did not take away her mobile phone.
She said she was forced to sleep with two Korean customers on her first day at work. Guards at the massage parlour, who the girl described as being ‘‘mafia’’, told her she had to have sex with customers to pay off a debt of about 50,000 baht she had incurred for her trip to South Korea.
The customers paid the shop about 2,000-3,000 baht per time, but she only received about 150 baht out of that, the girl said. On average, she said, she slept with four or five customers a day.
The girl said she knew there were other Thai women in the same situation at the parlour, but she said the guards would not allow the massage staff to talk to each other.
She said she begged the guards to let her go but they insisted she had to work until she had paid off the entire debt.
Her aunt’s husband was a business partner of the shop operator, so no one could help her, she said. The girl then realised she could reach the outside world via Facebook on her mobile phone.
She contacted Pol Lt Col Thanin when she saw he was listed on his Facebook profile as a police officer.
On May 22, warrants were issued for the arrests of three suspects: Ms Phiangjai, and the South Korean man and Thai woman who took the girl from Pattaya to Suvarnabhumi airport.
The Thai woman is identified as Thippawan Tempao, 26, while the Korean man has not been identified.
Ms Phiangjai returned to Thailand and turned herself in to the authorities, but denied any wrongdoing.
She insisted the girl willingly went to work at the massage parlour, which she insisted was not a brothel as alleged.
The aunt said her niece cooked up the story because she desperately wanted to go home.
Ms Phiangjai also said the girl’s mother was well aware of her daughter’s decision to travel to work in South Korea, and claimed the girl’s mother had also worked in the same massage shop in the past.
Ms Phiangjai is facing charges of human trafficking and procuring prostitution.