Is there pop-up brothel in YOUR street?
It’s more likely than you think as foreign gangs take advantage of the boom in short-term lets to sneak vice dens into even the most genteel neighbourhoods
ACCORDING to the online particulars, the threebedroom house in the heart of the Cornish seaside town of Newquay offered the perfect base for a family holiday. Recently refurbished and pet-friendly, as well as boasting a stylish and cosy interior, it also had a sunny, private patio that was ‘perfect for al fresco dining’. But for the three eastern European women and their male companion who booked the property last July, a leisurely barbecue was the last thing on their minds. Instead, neighbours of the terraced property, which costs up to £1,200 a week to rent in peak season, watched in horror as a steady stream of men started to make their way to and from the house.
One local was even woken at 4am by a knock on the door from a male visitor with the wrong address.
Fed up with the constant disturbances, residents contacted the landlord who immediately investigated. A quick search of the internet revealed that the mobile phone number his guests had left with him matched one recently posted on an internet advertisement for an escort.
‘Naughty Luisa here just for you!’ the ad read, alongside photographs of a nearnaked, dark-haired woman in a series of explicit poses. It then listed a number of ‘services’ Luisa was willing to offer — starting from as little as £40 — and a postcode in Newquay where she was temporarily based.
‘I phoned the number posing as a customer and was given the address of my holiday house,’ said the landlord, who asked not to be named. ‘They had booked legitimately and I had no reason to suspect anything.’
And why would he? Today, landlords, Airbnb owners and ordinary families who rent out a second home in lieu of a pension, rely almost exclusively on the internet or agents to market and rent out their properties.
But this month it emerged that holiday lets in the South-West are being targeted by criminals who use them for prostitution. Now police are warning owners of rental properties to be on their guard against a very modern and deeply worrying new phenomenon — the pop-up brothel.
Across the country, sex workers are hiring holiday homes as a base from which to sell their services.
Often operating in groups of two or three, they advertise online, moving to a different location every week.
This not only makes it difficult for the authorities to catch them, but maximises their earnings as they tour the country’s provincial towns and cities.
As well as resorts in Cornwall, pop-up brothels have been identified in the Lake District, Bournemouth, Cambridge, Preston, Aberdeen and Norwich.
Many of the women come from Eastern Europe, Romania in particular. And the fear is that many have been trafficked into the country by criminal gangs raking in vast sums of money.
Detective Inspector Nick Skipworth says cities such as Cambridge, where he is based, offer rich pickings.
He said: ‘We see a lot of them using flats and these will be £1,000-a-week flats. They can easily cover that. I chatted to one Polish girl who was 19 and she was seeing up to ten clients a day and making £100 a client.
‘There are certain places that they all seem to go and visit — the Romanians almost have a set tour route they follow around the UK.’
One of their favourite calling points is Newquay. The town is popular with everyone from families and surfers to stag parties. As a result, it has large numbers of properties available to rent throughout the year. Since the summer, 14 pop-up brothels have been identified in the town. But, according to the owner of the first property targeted, the police have been slow to respond.
The man, who does not wish to be identified, used a letting agency to market his property — but bumped into the sex workers while checking their accommodation ahead of their arrival.
‘The two girls were very nice and the man didn’t speak much English and kept handing me a phone to speak to another woman who did and who was on the way there — they all seemed very pleasant,’ he said.
But the day after they checked in, his neighbours alerted him to strange goings-on at the property.
A bit of detective work quickly confirmed the group was using his premises for nefarious purposes.
‘I phoned 101 to log a complaint, but the police were absolutely no help whatsoever,’ the landlord said. ‘They basically turned around and said they couldn’t do anything, that they would have to do surveillance at the property and it would take a week.
‘We pointed out that these people were only there for a week and we were already a couple of days into that, so doing the surveillance wouldn’t help.
‘We had the website and all the details and offered them complete access, but they basically said they were not interested. They could have gone in and got them, but because of their protocols they didn’t want to go in.’
Instead, it was left to the letting agency to call the guests and issue an ultimatum. ‘The manager phoned and said “we know what is going on,” ’ the owner said. ‘That was Sunday evening and he asked them to do us the courtesy of leaving. They left on Monday morning. We were all very worried about confronting them.’
Asked about their lack of action, a spokesman from Devon and Cornwall Police admitted the homeowner had been given incorrect advice.
‘The expected response, and one that has been put into action on a number of occasions since, is for police to attend the property promptly and speak to the sex workers and offer them support and signpost them to various welfare agencies, as many are forced into this profession by coercive behaviour and are victims themselves,’ he said.
For one prostitute visiting Aberdeen, the city was to be the scene of her mur-
‘They’ll use flats that rent for £1,000 a week’ Fourteen brothels have been found in Newquay alone
der. Jessica McGraa, who lived in London, rented a flat in Aberdeen where clients would visit.
Her life as an escort was exposed to her closest friends only after her murder at the hands of a client, Bala Chinda, who was jailed for 18 years after raping and killing her.
He killed the 37-year-old a few weeks after arriving in Scotland to study at Robert Gordon University.
As the law stands, it is illegal to run a brothel — by which it is meant premises used by two or more people for the purpose of prostitution. It is also illegal to pay for sex with someone under 18 or to have sex with someone who has been trafficked, irrespective of whether or not the customer knows that to be the case.
And for anyone using pop-up brothels, those are very real risks.
In August, the links between organised crime and pop-up brothels were highlighted by an international police operation which saw 16 people detained in Romania. Among the agencies taking part was Zephyr, the South-West Regional Organised Crime Unit.
The Zephyr operation began in the UK following investigations into a gang suspected of being involved in human trafficking offences relating to pop-up brothels across the SouthWest in the Avon and Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, Dorset, Gloucester and Wiltshire police force areas.
As well as the arrests, the early morning raids in Ploiesti, a city north of Bucharest, led to the seizure of cars, more than £9,000 in sterling, mobile phones and various forged IDs and bank documents.
Detective Inspector Tony Hubbard, the senior investigating officer from Zephyr said: ‘We want landlords who provide short-term accommodation to be vigilant and make sure their accommodation is not being used as a brothel. Tell-tale signs are requests for paperless transactions, cash payments, multiple occupancy of premises or approaches for rentals by two women and a sole man.’
Back in Cambridge, Mr Skipworth says a number of the women he has come into contact with have been trafficked. As well as speaking little or no English, they will have no idea where in the country they are.
‘We found a 16-year-old girl in one of the brothels,’ he says. ‘She was a Romanian who had been brought over here by a Romanian organised crime group. She had been trafficked around the country. There were explicit pictures of her circulating on the internet. We got her on a plane and got her back home.’
Arrests followed in that case and in others. One ongoing investigation has seen bank accounts containing £980,000 frozen.
By tracing the escort’s online advertisements and using the cameras covering Britain’s roads to track the car number plates of the men who control them, it is possible to follow the gangs, says Mr Skipworth.
They can be watched as they tour the country, opening pop-up brothels. ‘There are certain cities they all seem to go and visit,’ he says. ‘Cambridge is obviously on that list because it is a very affluent place with low street prostitution, so it’s a very easy place to make money.
‘Then there is Northampton, which traditionally has a large Romanian community, and also Leicester and Aberdeen.’
Earlier this month it emerged noisy sex parties were becoming a major problem in Edinburgh. The sessions were annoying neighbours who claimed flats had been rented out specifically for the sex parties.
Lothians Green MSP Andy Wightman said the parties were becoming a major problem in the capital. He said one constituent in the Old Town has had to endure ‘very audible sex parties’ in the flat above them.
One guest house owner in Barrow told how she only discovered what was going on when staff came across a tearful teenage girl at her property.
The owner, who didn’t want to be named, then looked back over CCTV footage and was shocked to find her property had been used on multiple occasions as a brothel. ‘It all started when a Romanian couple got in touch looking for a room,’ she told her local newspaper.
While they pretended to be together, video footage showed other men subsequently arriving at the property and dropping off other women, returning a few days later to collect them. A few weeks later, more Romanian women checked in.
‘I was on holiday when I was contacted by a staff member who told me she had found a Romanian girl crying in the corridor,’ the owner recalled.
They believed that this distraught female was a teenager. Staff called the police but the gang fled.
The owner added: ‘I decided to look back at CCTV and found out the prostitution had been going on for about three weeks. I also saw men waiting outside and going into the flat before leaving again. ’
A search of the internet found the website the women were using. ‘The site advertised the women and it was the address of my premises they were giving,’ she said. ‘I was so angry.’
Police, meanwhile, warn that the problem must be widespread.
‘We have such a high density of B&Bs, apartments and hotels in Cumbria and find it hard to believe it’s not happening more widely,’ said Detective Chief Inspector Nick Coughlan of Cumbria Police.
But, again, the only advice given to property owners is for them to be vigilant about customers.
Meanwhile in Cornwall, the landlord whose holiday let was used as an impromptu brothel is trying to put the matter behind him. ‘I bought all the neighbours restaurant vouchers to apologise,’ he says. ‘As for the house, that was all right. They left a bit of rubbish, but it was fairly tidy.’
Indeed, the only damage he could find was to a sofa. ‘A lipstick mark,’ he explains. An unwelcome memento of some very unwelcome guests.
‘We found a 16-year-old who’d been trafficked’